When we last saw former
welterweight and junior middleweight titleholder Paul Williams, it was July of
last year and he was taking more punches than anyone expected from Erislandy
Lara. Williams was returning to action following his knockout loss to Sergio
Martinez the previous November. Lara, an up-and-down Cuban who was coming off a
recent draw with Carlos Molina, seemed a safe opponent for Williams. He was not
known as a power puncher, had arguably lost to Molina and was at times, a
listless, non-aggressive sort who would play well into Williams’ volume-punching
hands.
The problem was that Lara
treated the fight like the Super Bowl, coming in game shape, ready to fight and
just as ready to display his solid punching ability. Further complicating
matters is Williams’ inability to avoid the left hand of a fellow southpaw-
which Lara is. Left after left landed on Williams. While he got in his shots,
the prevailing opinion was that perhaps the 30-year-old Williams, 40-2 (27),
was not the same fighter he was before he met Sergio Martinez (whom brutally
knocked out “The Punisher” in two rounds).
“You look at a fighter like
[Miguel] Cotto and it’s really a shame that two losses in our sport and people
are writing you off,” says Dan Goossen, who, along with adviser Al Haymon, has
promoted Williams his whole career. “Media, the experts, all these people think
that you’re through. Cotto, as we know, suffered two losses to [Manny] Pacquiao
and [Antonio] Margarito and obviously, he has shown that he isn’t through. I
have the same impression after the Sergio Martinez and Lara fights for Paul. I
heard the broadcasters halfway through the Lara fight say that Williams should
retire but I didn’t see a fighter against Martinez or Lara who I thought was
through. I saw a fighter that’s ready to go out there and prove himself to
these naysayers that believe he’s still ‘The Punisher.’ He’s a three-division
fighter, the same as Cotto was. He’s got two losses as Cotto and he will be
back as strong as Cotto after the 18th.”
Maybe so. The announcers on HBO
that night seemed to think he was a fighter all done in. They focused on that
and really nothing else. In the end, it was a bit unfair to Lara, who put in an
excellent performance against a guy HBO seemed to tag as finished.
However, insult was accompanied
by injury on this night in Atlantic City when the judges gave a clear Lara win to
Williams. The scores were so widely criticized that, soon after the fight,
New Jersey commissioner Aaron Davis (who handed out the judges’ assignments)
suspended ringside judges Donald Givens (116-114, Williams), Hilton Whitaker
III (115-114, Williams) and Al Bennett (114-114) indefinitely.
“I thought that was bullcrap,”
Williams said on a recent conference call. “It’s not like the judges were off
by more than one point. It was one point. Why would they want to make a big
deal about that? I thought that was bullcrap.”
To be fair to Williams, it did
feel as though Davis might be covering himself by giving into public opinion.
After all, he received no punishment for assigning three relatively
inexperienced judges to work a major fight on HBO. For Williams’ trainer,
George Peterson, the fight was close and the criticism of the outcome was more
on HBO’s calling of the fight than anything.
“The judges called it just like
that saw it,” said Peterson, “not the away the announcers saw it. The judges
saw it another way. They should let the announcers do their job and let the
judges do their job.”
“Most guys seen that he was
hitting me with clean punches to the head but this isn’t the amateurs. We're
counting body shots and I worked the body the most,” said Williams of the
decision.
It is clear that in Williams’
and Peterson’s minds, they won a close fight, as is their right. However you
scored the fight (and there are others who feel Williams did enough to win),
what was evident was that he was either rusty or slowing down. Something was
wrong.
At his best, Williams was a
giant volume puncher. At a reported (but seemingly taller) 6’1” with an 82”
reach, Williams was able to traverse 147 to 160 pounds with ease. But the
up-and-down nature of his weight moves along with a style that never fully utilized
his height and reach. Perhaps giving way to inside wars has dulled Williams
just a hair. Say what you want about him, he’s a warrior. He will not give up.
Williams simply will not stop coming. And maybe, at this stage of his career,
that is a problem.
Saturday night at the American
Bank Center in Corpus Christi, Texas (live on Showtime), Williams will once
again get the chance to prove that July was a fluke and the previous November
came down to a lucky left hand. The man he gets to prove it against? Japan’s
Nobuhiro Ishida, 24-6-2 (9), a lanky 6’1”, 36-year-old whose claim to fame is
knocking out junior middleweight contender James Kirkland in one round.
“I’m excited to be given this
opportunity and to be able to prove myself again,” said Williams. “I love that
because it’s just more motivation and that, come Feb. 18, I’m going to put on a
helluva show for my fans and the people who aren’t my fans.”
Ishida, a solid fighter who
takes to give, arguably hasn’t lost since 2004. He’s never been stopped nor
knocked down. Against Kirkland last April, he seemed a monster, dropping
Kirkland three times en route to a TKO win from out of nowhere. Though he has
porous defense, Ishida will be coming with confidence, conditioning and a
straight-ahead style that either will play right into Williams’ needs or it will
show us the end is nigh for “The Punisher.”
“[Against Kirkland] that was
his night,” said Williams. “You can’t fault anybody for coming in there like he
did and he won and he knocked him out. I have to give him his props for that.
He did what not a lot of guys have been able to do. Coming up on this fight on
the 18th, I know he’s in the best shape and he’s going to try and go
out and repeat that again.”
“I think Paul Williams has a
good chin and has a lot of power and is one of the top fighters in the world,”
said Ishida. “I didn’t expect to get a knockout against Kirkland. You never
really expect that. I’m not sure about a knockout against Paul Williams but I
think I will get the win. I’m going to make it a very long night for Paul
Williams.”
Williams has now been off for
almost seven months. In this day and age, sadly, that is par for the course
with many premium cable-TV fighters. But while the fighter makes more money and
thus is able to rest between fights longer, he also becomes rusty. Taking off
that much time, then hitting the gym and going into a fight becomes more like Russian
Roulette. As a fighter ages, the possibility of coming out and shooting blanks
becomes greater and greater. Williams insisted he has been ready to fight all
year but the opportunity did not arise.
“It’s not us. We always want to
fight. It’s finding the right opponent to say yes. A lot of times, we don’t
know who we are going to fight until the last month or the last couple of
weeks,” said Williams.
Strangely enough, Williams was
originally slated to face Ishida instead of Lara last year. HBO turned down
Ishida as unacceptable. This year, on Showtime, Ishida is now acceptable. Go
figure. In any case, the fight is all action. Will it tell us if Williams is
top-shelf after all these wars? Who knows? Ishida may or may not be a top-level
contender himself. He could have caught Kirkland at the same time and just been
lucky- or he could be experiencing a late-career surge.
Likely, we will just see an
action fight that goes the distance. Should Williams win, he will go on to a
lucrative fight with a bigger name than Lara. He appears to have no interest in
avenging what he deems a bad night at the office.
“I have no reason to fight
[Lara] again,” said Williams. “He didn’t get any fame and glory for winning
that fight. All he got is me having a bad night. That’s about it. If he had
gone out and gotten a title, then I would definitely like to fight him again.”
Williams may or may not prove a
lot of things Saturday night. One thing he will never have to prove is that he
has the heart of a lion. Say what you will about his adviser or the sway he
gets with the networks, Paul Williams comes to fight. How well he performs when
he does remains to be seen.
Uh-oh…
Lucky us. We get an action
fight on Saturday night. There is one
problem with the card.
“Corpus Christi has always been
a great fight town and we expect a great crowd out there on Feb. 18,” said
Goossen. “Texas has always been a great state for our sport and we thank Dickie
Cole and all their commission.”
Hopefully, Commissioner Dickie Cole has remembered to call the local
anti-doping lab to come to the fight this time. Not to cast aspersions on any
fighter on this card because I’ve never a PED rumor about any of these fighters
but the health and safety of all is job one. Making sure everyone is working on
the same playing field is vital and I would hate to have the Texas inspectors
fill up bottles of urine again only to throw them out because Dickie forgot to
make a call.
