By Dave Lahr: Light middleweight Paul Williams (36-1, 27 KOs) hopes to add another name to his long list of wins when he faces his biggest test of his nine-year pro career in Ronald “Winky” Wright )51-4-1, 25 KOs) this Saturday night at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino, in Las Vegas, Nevada. The lanky 6’2” Williams, who is coming off a 8th round TKO over Verno Phillips in November 2008, is moving around different weight classes in order to get the biggest fight possible for him.
It’s unfortunately come to that for Williams, because he’s been unable to land fights with the shorter Miguel Cotto, Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Antonio Margarito, the top welterweights that Williams had on the top of his list. Mayweather Jr. retired a year ago, but he’s been said to be considering coming back, although it will never be against a fighter as talented as Williams, you can count on that.
Wright, 37, is stepping back in the ring after a nearly two year absence following a narrow 12-round unanimous decision loss to Bernard Hopkins in 2007. Coming off that loss, Wright did himself no favors by looking only for big named opponents to fight, because he ended up excluding a lot of younger, less popular fighters with a lot of talent that Wright could have further increased his name popularity in boxing.
Unfortunately for him, there were no big named fighters like Oscar De La Hoya or Roy Jones Jr. who were interested in fighting Wright, so instead of staying busy, Wright cooled his heals and stayed inactive all this time.
Now, after nearly two years, he has found a good opponent in the 27-year-old Williams, but it may now may too late for Wright because of the long period of time he’s been away from boxing.
Normally with this amount of time off from the sport the reasonable thing for a fighter like Wright to do would be to fight a couple of warm up bouts before stepping it up against someone as talented as Williams.
However, Wright wants nothing to do with any tune-up bouts and is going into this fight in a rather risky, gambling manner. Perhaps Williams knows something I don’t, but on the surface it doesn’t look to be the smartest move on Wright’s part for him to do this. But, then again, he’s also the one that chose not to fight all this time waiting around for a huge fight that never came.
If Wright comes into this fight at 80% of what he was in his last bout against Hopkins, I think Wright has an excellent chance of beating Williams. Paul tends to minimize his long reach and height advantage by looping almost all of his shots.
Although he used to not jab all that much, since his 12-round unanimous decision defeat to Carlos Quintana in February 2008, Williams has started using his jab a lot more than he used to. However, he still likes to throw his looping hooks far too much for my tastes.
If he makes that mistake against Wright, it will be easy win for Winky. Williams, I hope, has studied Wright’s 12-round lopsided decision victory over Felix Trinidad in May 2005 and seen that Wright easily neutralized Trinidad’s hooks by jabbing him straight down the middle over and over again.
The hooks that Trinidad was able to throw, Wright easily picked off with his high guard. Since I haven’t seen much of a change in Williams’ tendencies to throw a lot of looping hooks in his past three fights, I think it’s safe to say that he’ll fight that way against Wright and probably lose.
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