(Photo Credit: Esther Lin / SHOWTIME) By Eric Thomas: Former two time WBO welterweight champion Paul Williams (40-2, 27 KO’s) fights on Saturday night against junior middleweight contender Nobuhiro Ishida (24-6-2, 9 KO’s) in a scheduled 12 round bout on Showtime at the American Bank Center, in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Williams, 30, has a lot of boxing fans thinking he’s completely shot after getting knocked out in the 2nd round by Sergio Martinez in November 2010, and then coming back and taking a terrible beating in a gift 12 round decision over Erislandy Lara last July.

You really have to call that a loss, not a win, because it was so one-sided and Williams took such a bad beating in that fight. It was just terrible scoring by the judges. Williams is kidding himself if he thinks he deserved to win that fight, and there are a lot of questions about how much he has left as he goes into Saturday’s fight against the 36-year-old Ishida.

This is definitely a winnable fight for Williams because Ishida, #10 WBC, #2 WBA, doesn’t have much power and he doesn’t typically throw a lot of punches. Williams has little to fear in this bout compared to if he were to be facing a higher ranked contender like Lara, Vanes Martirosyan and James Kirkland.

Ishida looked great in blowing out Kirkland by a 1st round knockout last April, but that’s not really the kind of fighter that Ishida is. He never comes out that fast against anyone and never just unloads with a massive amount of punches like he was doing against Kirkland. That was more of a survival mechanism that kicked in with Ishida. He likely knew that unless he matched Kirkland punch for punch, he wouldn’t last very long.

Talking about matching a fighter punch for punch, Williams,
#7 WBC, #3 WBA, #13 IBF, #6 WBO, plans on really emptying his toolbox in this fight. Williams “Whatever he throws, I’m going to throw five times more. I’m going to show him how American boys do it..”