By Jason Kim: So much for Ronald “Winky” Wright’s (51-5-1, 25 KOs) so-called high guard defense. Tonight, Paul Williams (37-1, 27 KOs) made a mockery of Wright’s once airtight defense, raining countless punches on Wright and simply overwhelming his guard, beating him by a lopsided 12-round unanimous decision at the Mandalay Bay Events center, in Las Vegas, Nevada. The final judge’s scores were 119-109, 119-109 and 120-108.
Wright, 37, looked every bit of his age tonight in getting dominated by the younger 27-year-old Williams. It’s not hard to see why the other welterweights and light middleweights in boxing are so reluctant to fight Williams, because with his size and his high punch volume, he’s hard to deal with.
Wright tried to kick start his jabbing, which is his main weapon, in the early going of the fight, but he had major problems doing this because Williams wouldn’t stop punching long enough for Wright to get his mechanical – jab-jab-jab – machine going. Williams won virtually every round of the fight, throwing twice as many punches as Wright – 1086 to 511.
The fight was terribly one-sided, as Williams was like a machine in the way that he would start and end each round by throwing nothing but one looping shot after another. It was thought that Wright would be able to take advantage of Williams’ tendency to throw a lot of wide punches by landing down the middle with jabs and straight lefts.
However, by Williams continuing to punch even when getting hit with jabs by Wright, it effectively paralyzed Wright’s offense and put him more or less in a turtle-like shell to try and block some of the incoming fire.
Obviously, Wright couldn’t fight and try to block punches at the same time because Williams was throwing far too many punches fro Wright to get things going for more than a second or two without getting drilled by one of Williams’ many punches.
Williams wasn’t throwing huge shots by any means, but the sheer volume had to have been like getting stung by a thousand angry bees, making Wright gun shy with his punches. As the fight progressed and it became clear that Wright was hopelessly behind in the fight, he tried to use movement on Williams, looking as if he was attempting to take a page out of the Carlos Quintana playbook to use on Williams.
Quintana had beaten Williams by a 12-round unanimous decision in 2008 by using lateral movement and a good deal of quick in and out attacks to score points. Up to that point in Williams’ career, he had been able to walk most of his opponents down in a kind of plodding attack, and then overwhelm them against the ropes with nonstop punches.
However, Quintana refused to fight in a stationary manner and it paid off in a victory. Williams came back four months later and knocked Quintana out in the 1st round by loading up with his shots. Wright gave it a game effort to get his old wheels going in the later rounds, but he didn’t have the youth needed to be mobile enough to cause Williams any problems.
In each case that Wright tries to use movement, Williams would quickly follow after him continuing to hit him as he would move laterally. In the end, Wright tried both plan A and plan B, but needed a third plan in order to beat Williams.
Alas, Wright had no more ideas to fall back on and ended up getting battered like he never was before. Wright didn’t help his case by being out of the ring for 21 months prior to this fight and having had no tune-ups beforehand. It seemed like a crazy idea for Wright to go straight from all that inactivity into a fight with a talented fighter like Williams, and sure enough, it turned out to be a losing recipe for Wright.
He’ll learn from it, but unfortunately for Wright, he’s stuck with the loss at a bad time in his career. It’s never good to be beaten this badly at Wright’s age.
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