By Jim Dower: Minutes after losing a badly one-sided 12-round unanimous decision loss to Paul Williams (37-1, 27 KOs) last night, former light middleweight champion Ronald “Winky” Wright (51-5-1, 25 KOs) said that he plans on getting back in the ring to continue his career after his loss to Williams, saying “It’s been 21 months. I’ve been off for a long time. I’m coming back real soon. It’s definitely not my last fight. It’s been 21 months. I came back and fought the best, and I came up short tonight, but I’m coming back.”
So, there you have it straight from Wright’s mouth. He plans on coming back soon, the question is: should he? If Wright continues fighting, he’ll likely be fighting in the middleweight division against young and talented fighters like Kelly Pavlik, Arthur Abraham, Sebastian Zbik, John Duddy and Gennady Golovkin. However, given that Wright isn’t currently ranked in the top 15 in the middleweight division or the light middleweight division, I don’t precisely know how Wright is going to go about getting the big fights that he wants to fight.
Certainly, none of the top fighters are likely to do him any favors and give him a fight, because first of all he’s a southpaw. And, second of all, Wright is a counter puncher with an excellent jab and an almost impregnable defense. Williams may have been able to defeat Wright’s defensive armor by overwhelming with punches, but few other fighters in boxing can do what Williams did to Wright.
I’m guessing that Wright isn’t a fighter that’s highly sought after by the big names in boxing essentially because of his great skills he has, so Wright may continue to find himself getting big named opponents to fight him. The problem here is that he’s now 37, and has very little time left in the sport.
He may be able to stick around for awhile by fighting lower level fighters, but by the time that Wright works his way back as a mandatory challenger one of the middleweight champions, he could be nearing 40. At that age, I can’t see Wright beating any of the champions, no matter who it is.
I think If Wright could get a fight with Pavlik, Sturm or Abraham right now, I’d give him a great chance of beating all three. But, none of those guys are about to fight someone as dangerous as Wright, which means that Wright isn’t going to get these guys to voluntarily take a fight with him.
Since that’s likely to be the case, unless Wright is totally in love with the sport of boxing and is planning on sticking around until his mid 40s like Bernard Hopkins, he might want to consider handing up the gloves for good.
If he has to work his way into a title spot, it probably isn’t worth the trouble. Of course, Wright could shoot for someone like Jeff Lacy, who’s been having problems of his own as of late. However, I doubt that Lacy would want to fight another southpaw. He did badly against Joe Calzaghe. The same goes for Roy Jones Jr.
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