By Matt Stein: Last night, Paul Williams (37-1, 27 KOs) showed how much better he is than the other welterweights, junior middleweights and middleweights, by defeating Winky Wright (51-5-1, 25 KOs) by a near shutout 12-round unanimous decision at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino, in Las Vegas. If you were expecting a close fight, then you were in for a disappointment because Wright was beaten every which way by Williams, who punched nearly nonstop for the full 12 rounds and never really let Wright get into the fight.
It was especially startling when considering how talented a fighter Wright is and to watch him get beaten this badly was scary. Williams won almost every round on two of the judges’ scores, and all 12 on the other, and, really, I can’t see where Wright was able to win even one. The judges’ scores were 119-109, 119-109 and 120-108.
Williams made Wright look like a novice tonight, bettering him with hooks, jabs and hard body shots. I don’t that Wright could have stood a better chance if he were 10 years younger, because it seemed as if Williams was simply a superior fighter on a higher level which had nothing to with age.
As the fight progressed into the later rounds, it reminded me of how Jeff Lacy was dominated by Joe Calzaghe in 2006, only this was even worse than that fight. Williams was throwing harder shots than Calzaghe and landing with much more force than the slaps that Calzaghe was raining down on Lacy.
An argument can be made that the fight should have been stopped by the 10th or 11th in order to save Wright from absorbing anymore needless punishment, but neither his corner or the referee Joe Cortez were interested in stopping the bout. Unable to block all of William’s continuous punches, Wright began to use a lot of clinching in the latter half of the bout to try and stem the flow of punches.
It only partly worked, because as soon as Williams would get any daylight after being separated from Winky, he’d begin all over again landing near nonstop punches to the head and body.
This win may have the opposite effect of attracting future opponents for Williams, because after seeing how easily he handled Wright, I can’t see middleweights like Arthur Abraham, Kelly Pavlik or Felix Sturm wanting to fight him. They probably won’t want to tangle with him unless he gets ranked in the middleweight division, and only then if he becomes one of their mandatory challengers.
Likewise, there are probably not a lot of light middleweights that will want to fight him either. It doesn’t matter who, Williams would cause the best in the division like James Kirkland all kinds of problems with his nonstop punching.
After the fight, Williams said that he plans on moving back down to the welterweight division so that he can reclaim his WBO welterweight title that was stripped from him when he moved up to light middleweight to take on Verno Phillips. Currently, the WBO welterweight champion is Miguel Cotto. I bet he’s probably not overjoyed with the prospect of fighting someone Williams, who is like a better version of Antonio Margarito.
I wonder if Cotto would accept this fight or possibly vacate the belt in order to prevent an almost certain beating similar – if not worse – than the one that Wright took tonight. For sure, Wright took an enormous amount of shots by Williams and it’s hard to imagine other fighters like Cotto, Abraham, Sturm or Pavlik wanting to tempt a similar fate.
Their whole offenses, with the exception of Sturm, are based on them being able to hurt and knockout their opponents. When they fail at this, you see instances where they lose badly like in Pavlik’s case, his loss to Hopkins. Williams has an excellent chin, and probably won’t be hurt by any of them.
This seems to suggest that Williams would beat them perhaps as easily as he beat Wright. Because of that, I see Williams continuing to have problems in the future landing fights against the big names in boxing. No one will want to take a beating like the one that Wright took tonight, and they’ll no doubt go out of their way to avoid having it happen.
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