LAST STAND OR FIRST TEST?

August 15, 2006 - by Ron Borges

Boxing is a cruel but circular business for most of its long-time practitioners. Sharmba Mitchell understands that in the visceral way one feels something without outwardly acknowledging it. He understands reality yet refuses to make himself a part of it.

This ability to compartmentalize one's life keeps 35-year-old boxers like Mitchell going. It's what allows them to accept fights with kids like undefeated, power-punching Paul Williams, who Mitchell will face Saturday night on HBO's Boxing After Dark series, without seeing such a match as a reversal of his own fortunes.

To view such a fight as opportunity rather than as merely a payday at Mitchell's age requires the kind of outlook Dr. Norman Vincent Peale advocates. It well illustrates the power of positive thinking for there is a grim reality to such an endeavor as this, or at least a belief in some corners of what that reality will become on Saturday night, that argues that this fight is not about Mitchell.

Once, 14 years ago, Mitchell was standing in the place where Paul Williams is now. He was a hot prospect on the rise who would eventually twice win the junior welterweight title. He was all about speed and slickness and promise and old pros like former world champion Rocky Lockridge were his stepping stone. The night Mitchell battered a 33-year-old Lockridge into permanent retirement was a coming out party for him, a night that was all about Sharmba Mitchell.

Saturday night is supposed to be that kind of party for Paul Williams, 30-0 with 22 knockouts all against nondescript opponents who lack the pedigree or resume of Mitchell. Williams is supposed to walk into the ring and do to Mitchell what he did so long ago to Lockridge. Retire him.

But while that is a sad or uplifting story, depending on which side of the page you are on, it is one that does not always go as planned.

Mitchell understands this better than Williams, who is young and untested and has no idea yet what can happen inside a boxing ring on the wrong night because he has had nothing but right nights so far. That's what it means to be 25 and lean and powerful. What it means to be 35 and slowing and coming off bad beatings from Floyd Mayweather, Jr. and Kostya Tszyu the past two years is to look at a kid like Williams and focus not on what he is but on what he is not.

He is not Floyd Mayweather, Jr. (who is?). He is not Kostya Tszyu. He is, in Mitchell's mind, more a guy like Jose Luis Cruz, who was 31-1-2 on May 3 when Mitchell boxed him into a trance, easily beating him in the same way Shane Mosley had in his previous fight. Suddenly, in just two nights, Cruz had gone from undefeated to undone. The same could happen to Williams on the wrong night because he too is untested by the kind of deep water Mitchell has waded through successfully when he defeated Ben Tackie, Vince Phillips, Lovemore N'Dou and others with far more experience than young Williams possesses.

That's why Mitchell says of Williams, "Every fighter has to take a step up at some point. He's taking that step up (Saturday night). He's never fought anyone like me.''

That certainly is true but what Williams' people are banking on is the same thing Mitchell's people were the night they put their young prospect in with a faded Rocky Lockridge. They're banking that the step up is not as high as it once was, believing that because Mitchell is 3-2 in his last five fights he has reached the stage where he won't be able to keep up with the withering pace Williams sets in most of his fights if they go long enough for such a pace to be set in the first place.

At 6-2, Williams is a towering welterweight, a guy compared to Thomas Hearns both because of his unusual height for a 147 pounder but also for his proven punching power against fighters far less skilled than the slickly moving Mitchell. He will have about a seven inch reach advantage over Mitchell as well as all the advantages of youth. What he won't have is what Mitchell will be relying on. He won't have experience and he won't have the kind of boxing skill that takes long years and hard nights to develop.

"He's got an amateur style,'' Mitchell (57-5, 30 KO) noted and he's quite right about that. Mitchell has as many knockouts as Williams has fights and many of those came against guys who didn't know what they didn't know until they were on the floor. That is what stepping stone fights are all about. Saturday night Williams will enter the ring feeling he is invulnerable. He will believe Mitchell is just another guy who is going to fall down when he gets cracked with one of his wide, sweeping hooks and that might well be the case for Mitchell is more vulnerable and less what he once was than he used to be.

But the professional stepping stone is not the way Sharmba Mitchell sees himself. Two fights ago he was in with Mayweather and it didn't go well but what does that have to do with a kid like Williams, whose skills are nothing like the pound-for-pound best fighter in the world?

"Sharmba is not in my class,'' Williams said recently but Mitchell hears that and thinks only that Williams has no idea what class a fighter like the one he's about to face is in. He has no idea what it's like to match ones skills against Tszyu or Mayweather or even Tackie or Phillips.

Williams speaks from the blindness of youth, in Mitchell's opinion, while he looks at things from a different perspective.

Although Mitchell has lost five times they were to fighters with a combined record of 96-1. Take the combined records of the fighters the kid from Augusta, Ga. has beaten and that ratio would be reversed to a great extent. That is why Mitchell looks at his young opponent as the one who is in for a surprise. The same kind of surprise a lot of guys 30-0 with a bunch of knockouts over nondescript postmen and part-time truck drivers have gotten so many times in boxing's long history.

For not all stepping stones remain on the ground once the first bell sounds. Some of them with the kind of pedigree Mitchell has come in and remind the world that there are levels in boxing and not everyone can reach them. Another untested hot prospect named Joel Julio found that out recently when Carlos Quintana, who was supposed to be there to take a beating instead administered one to a kid who'd knocked out 24 of his 27 victims. Suddenly instead of hitting Quintana he was hitting air and as his frustration mounted Julio began to fade, taking a bitter beating for most of what became a one-sided fight.

Mitchell believes Paul Williams might find himself in the same predicament even though he's older than Quintana, who was also undefeated and a step up when he got in with Julio. Mitchell is well removed from being undefeated and, at 35, knows time is running out on him. The circle of boxing is coming around for him but he is not fixated on that.

His thoughts are on other things for he knows he just outboxed and outfoxed young Cruz in his last fight and believes himself well capable of doing the same to Williams, who had only 10 amateur fights before going pro and hence lacks much of an understanding at this point of the kind of things Mitchell is expert in.

In the end, youth tends to triumph over age but not always. Power and the kind of pressure Williams puts on opponents tend to negate speed when the faster man is 35, smaller and never been in possession of the kind of power one has to fear. Sharmba Mitchell understands such things because he was 25 and dominate once, a southpaw no one wanted to fight if they could avoid him.

Now, at 35, Mitchell is sure young Paul Williams doesn't intend to avoid him, at least not at the outset. He intends to use the former world champion for his own purposes, turn him into a version of Rocky Lockridge.

Sharmba Mitchell has but one thing to say to a young man with such thoughts.

"We'll see about that,'' he thinks and then he goes back to practicing the kind of slick footwork that helped him beat 57 men, many of them far more proven commodities in boxing than his young opponent.

Perhaps Paul Williams' handlers will be proven right Saturday night. Perhaps the kid from Georgia with so many stylistic flaws will rise above them on the strength of his youth and punching power and move on. But when your greatest victory is over someone named Walter Matthyesse, who was admittedly 25-0 with 24 KOs himself at the time but was as untested as Williams, it means something.

It means you have no idea yet what you're getting into the ring with in Reno this Saturday night because a stepping stone is also a step up and if that step is just a little too high you can stumble and fall. Sharmba Mitchell, a realist adept at ignoring reality, understands all he has to now prove is that he is too high a step for a kid who still thinks every night in boxing is an easy night.