By Eric Thomas: As expected, Paul Williams (36-1, 27 KOs) defeated Verno Phillips (42-11-1, 21 KOs) on Saturday night, stopping him after Phillips failed to answer the bell for the 9th round at the Citizens Business Bank Arena, in Ontario, California. The fight had few real exciting moments, as Williams basically teed off on the undersized 5’7″ Phillips from round one until the fight was stopped in between the 8th and 9th rounds, out-landing him by a huge margin in every round.
The fight was marred by a head butt that occurred late in the 1st round, which opened a large cut over the right eyebrow of Williams and bled badly for the remainder of the fight. However, Phillips, who was celebrating his 39th birthday on the night, was unable to take advantage of the cut due to his anemic work rate.
Phillips fought well in the first two rounds, landing good counter punches against the long-armed Williams and getting the better of him on the inside. In the 3rd round, Williams began to land a lot of hard shots to the body of Phillips.
It was sort of an odd thing to see, because with his 6’2″ height and his long reach advantage, one would assume that Williams would want to fight on the outside where he wouldn’t have to expose himself to the short punches from Phillips.
Nevertheless, Williams wasn’t afraid of being hit and focused almost entirely on hitting Phillips with blistering body shots. No doubt, Williams had to have studied tapes on him and seen that Phillips had some problems in prior fights when taking hard body shots.
Indeed, Williams’s body shot seemed to cause Phillips’ punch output to drop off almost at once, cutting it off from a trickle to almost nothing after only one round. Phillips, however, landed a couple of hard left hands in the round, bloodying Williams’ nose.
The action was stopped briefly by the referee so that the ringside doctor could examine Williams’ cut above his right eye. However, he deemed that it wasn’t a problem and allowed the fight to continue on.
In the 4th and 5th rounds, Williams badly out-landed Phillips, again and again hitting him with big body shots. Phillips looked to be in a great deal of pain on several of these occasions as he would grimace when Williams would throw to the body.
Unlike in his past fights in which he would slap with his shots, Williams seemed to be loading up with every punch he threw. In a way, that was a huge improvement over his former slapping style of fighting, but at the same time, it often left Williams vulnerable to getting hit with counter shots by Phillips.
In the 6th and 7th rounds, Phillips began to show his age, hanging on the ropes and covering up while Williams banged to the body with big hooks. Phillips briefly put together a string of good left hand shots late in the 7th, but Williams quickly shut him down, landing another barrage of body shots.
In the 8th round, Phillips assumed his normal position against the ropes, covering up and taking sustained punishment from Williams in the way of big body shots. Like in most rounds, Phillips only threw a handful of punches and was badly out-gunned.
After the round ended, Phillips corner stopped the fight due to the punishment that he’d received. With the win, Williams wins the interim World Boxing Organization light middleweight title. He’s said to be intent on challenging, too, for both the middleweight and eventually the super middleweight titles in the near future, a move made because he can’t get enough big fights at the welterweight division where he currently holds the WBO title.
Naturally, not too many of the other top welterweights are eager to fight him due to his high work rate and huge 6’2″ size. That being said, I see eventual problems for him if he moves up to the middleweight and super middleweight division, because his size isn’t considered all that big for those divisions and he’d possibly have problems against big punchers like Arthur Abraham and Kelly Pavlik, both of whom are close to the same size as him but hit much harder.
At super middleweight, Williams would have to contend with Mikkel Kessler and Lucian Bute, both of whom are much craftier than Carlos Quintana, who gave Williams a lot of problems, beating him by a 12-round unanimous decision in February. Williams would later avenge the defeat with a 1st round TKO four months later in June, but it’s unclear whether he could have kept it up if the fight had gone the full 12-rounds. Kessler and Bute are both hard to hit, have excellent jabs and fight well both on the inside and outside.
This wouldn’t be a fight that Williams would be able to win by overwhelming them with punches, because each of them move constantly, rarely presenting a stationary target and have excellent defensive skills. We may just see Williams butting into a ceiling when he meets them, in an over reach of his ability.
Comments are closed.