TALL TALE TO LIVE UP TO

August 14, 2006 - by Nat Gottlieb

If Antonio Margarito is "the most feared fighter on the planet today," as promoter Bob Arums likes to say, then how scary does that make super prospect Paul Williams?

A welterweight who stands 6'-2'' with longer arms than many heavyweights, the unbeaten Williams (30-0, 22 KOs) is already being compared to a young Tommy Hearns, heady stuff for a polite Georgia kid who says "sir" a lot, even when he talks trash:

"I saw highlights of Tommy Hearns' fight against Sugar Ray Leonard, sir, so I understand why they are comparing me to him. But I've got much better movement than Tommy, and I throw a lot more punches than he did," Williams said.

Despite Williams' evident modesty, only time will tell if he will cast a shadow as long as Hearns. But the brash 25-year-old already has some tantalizing "history" trailing him concerning Margarito.

In L.A., where gossip and rumor are staples as necessary as gasoline, a "cult" story has made the rounds among boxing aficionados about the time Williams supposedly walked into the now defunct L.A. Boxing Club two years ago and laid some serious hurt on then and still welterweight champion Margarito, during a sparring session.

Like most such stories, distortion and embellishment are by now firmly implanted, but the tale is worth telling because of what it says about Paul Williams, who will fight former two-time champion Sharmba Mitchell (57-5, 30 KOs) Saturday night, live on "Boxing After Dark" from the Reno Events Center.

The most popular version of "The Williams-Margarito War" goes like this:

One summer day, Williams just wandered into the L.A. Boxing Club uninvited with gloves hanging around his massive shoulders. Williams happened to glance at Margarito, the two locked eyes, and with only a silent nod at each other, headed immediately for the ring to get it on. A war erupted and Williams got the best of the more accomplished Margarito.

Sounds impressive, but the truth is -- maybe it happened that way, and maybe it didn't. This is what we know:

Williams, a southpaw, was working out in the summer of 2004 at the D.C. gym owned by his trainer/manager, George Peterson, when a call came from the West Coast. Sergio Diaz, who manages Margarito, had a September title fight scheduled for his champion against then junior middleweight belt holder, Daniel Santos, a southpaw. Santos is nearly six feet tall, and Diaz was looking for a tall, lefty sparring partner who wasn't afraid to bang it around with Margarito, whose sparring sessions reportedly get nasty.

Peterson, who had already let Williams spar with several champion-caliber fighters -- including O'Neil Bell, Robert Allan, William Joppy and Travis Simms -- didn't hesitate to sign a three-week contract, especially since Williams had his own bout scheduled for September and could use quality work.

For the rest of the story, we go first to the challenger's corner.

"The opening week went by, and the sessions were average," Peterson said. "Then we got into the middle of the second week and that's when it heated up. Paul hit Margarito with a shot to the body that hurt him, and Margarito didn't like it so he tried to rough Paul up. It got out of control, and they really went at it.

"Then Paul hit him hard on top and opened up a nick on Margarito's eye. Paul knew Antonio had a big fight coming up, so he didn't want to hurt his face. The next two rounds, Paul just hit him with shots to the body. At the end of the day, the manager came over to us and said, 'Hey man, we're going to have to let you go, you're beating our man up."

Cool. So this kid Williams must be one tough hombre. But did it really happen that way?

Williams: "Yes sir, exactly like that. I was just too much for him. I had too much speed and quickness. I wasn't trying to make a statement or nothing, just doing my normal sparring."

From the other corner:

"I was there for all the training sessions, and for Paul to be saying something like that, I am surprised, because he is such a good kid," Diaz said. "They definitely had a war, but that's how Antonio trains. All his sessions are wars. Ask Sergio Mora (ex-"Contender" winner). We had him in with Antonio, Antonio knocked his head gear off and Mora kept fighting."

So who won the war with Williams?

"Paul did hurt him, but Antonio also hurt Paul," Diaz said. "Paul probably didn't mention the time that Antonio knocked him down, did he? I was worried when that happened because Paul was doing a great job for us, I was afraid he might leave, but he stayed."

And Margarito's take?

"I spoke to Antonio today," Diaz said, "and told him Paul was talking how much he hurt him. Antonio said, 'Wow, I don't even know who this guy is.' So I said he was the tall kid we brought in before your fight with Santos. He said, 'Oh, I think I remember the guy now.'"

So why did Diaz fire Williams, as Peterson claims, if no beating took place.

"When we let him go, it was just time on our schedule to bring in lighter, quicker fighters to work on Antonio's speed and movement," Diaz said. "We were done with the banging.

"What Paul is trying to do is get his name up there. "Right now Antonio is the most feared fighter out there. So Paul is saying he beat him up to grab attention."

To you, Paul:

"No sir, I am not making it up. What I did to Antonio really boosted my confidence to another level. Everybody is saying nobody wants to fight him, that he is the most feared guy around. I say, I'd love to fight him, why not give me a shot. But they won't because they know if we do get in a fight, he's going to lose."

George?

"It was no big thing to me the way Paul handled Margarito," Peterson said. "That was gravy. I've had him (Williams) in the ring with 10 world champions, and Paul handled those guys. Margarito was nothing compared to them."

Call it a draw. Better yet, just call if sparring. For a take on sparring, let's go to Larry Merchant, HBO commentator:

"All I can say about sparring stories is, always get the other side," Merchant said. "I once saw a young Ken Norton beat up on Joe Frazier in sparring. Frazier asked for one more round and ran him out of the ring."

The benefit to a younger fighter is greater than to the veteran, Merchant says.

"It can help a young fighter's confidence to feel he was competitive with an established pro in sparring."

What ever the case, the bottom line is that the real test of Williams will come in the ring, where so far he has beaten only largely club fighters, with the notable except of highly- regarded prospect, Walter Matthysse. Matthysse was a much-touted Argentinian with 24 knock outs on his 25-0 record when he squared off with Williams in May on HBO's "Boxing After Dark." Williams manhandled the hard-punching Matthysse, perhaps in the same way he allegedly roughed up Margarito, and emerged still unbeaten after a 10th round TKO.

Merchant was impressed, but had reservations.

"Willliams looked like a good prospect who had 15 fights, not 30," Merchant said. "He was so widen, using offense to compensate for lack of defense. Hearns had defense because of his long amateur career."

Ready for prime time or not, this Saturday night, Williams would appear to be taking a significant step up in class, when he faces Mitchell. While Mitchell at 35 is past his prime, he was in the ring just last year with Floyd Mayweather Jr., and managed to last six rounds before getting knocked out. Against Mayweather, maybe that's an accomplishment.

If Williams, raw as he is, beats Mitchell, Merchant would not be all that surprised.

"Sometimes an incomplete, but strong athletic and determined young fighter can beat top guys despite flaw, as Jermain Taylor has shown. We'll see about Williams," Merchant said.

As for the edge in experience, Mitchell has fought in nine championship fights, winning seven of them. Those nine bouts gave Mitchell a combined total of 94 championship rounds, which compares favorably to the sum total of Williams' entire professional ring time, 113 rounds.

All of which might not amount to a hill of beans if Williams is truly the next coming of Tommy Hearns. At a comparable stage in both their careers, Hearns had a 28-0 record with only 106 total rounds of experience when he stepped into the ring in 1980 to face welterweight champion Pipino Cuevas, who had made 11 straight successful title defenses. Hearns unmercifully pounded on Cuevas for five minutes and 29 seconds before referee Stanley Christodoulou stopped the fight in the second round, thus beginning the legend of one Thomas "Hitman" Hearns.

The big difference between Hearns and Williams at this stage is the disparity in their amateur careers, as Merchant noted. Hearns fought in 155 amateur fights, winning 147 of them, including the AAU National and the Golden Gloves titles in 1977, shortly before turning pro. (As a side note, Hearns, who won his first 17 pro fights by knockout, and 22 of his first 23, had a total of just 11 KOs as an amateur. Go figure).

Williams, meanwhile, had just 10 amateur fights, winning seven. Apparently all that head gear and touchy-feeling scoring didn't appeal to young Paul. "I tried the amateurs, but I didn't like it. Too much politics," Williams said.

Williams also gives lie to an Arum litany that young kids in America today don't go into boxing because they see how much more money is to be made in the NBA, NFL and MLB.

While very tall at an early age, Williams never gave a serious thought to basketball, and his reason why tells you something about what kind of fighter he is.

"I played some street basketball," Williams said. "I was good, sir, but I didn't like the sport. I didn't like the fact that it could come down to the last shot to win the game and somebody besides me would take it and miss and you lose. I didn't like depending on other guys. With boxing, it's all you in there."

You, and not Tommy Hearns, he would add. While an admirer of Hearns, Williams has no ring idols. That he is compared to Hearns is just the way the industry is, according to the "Hitman's" original mentor, Hall of Fame trainer Emanuel Steward, an HBO commentator. "When a tall young fighter comes along at middleweight or welterweight, and he's got some coordination and can make the weight, they always say, 'Oh, he may be another Tommy Hearns," Steward said. "Tommy wasn't compared to anybody, because he was an original. He was the first elongated guy with skills and coordination and hype. He had so much impact, that other fighters are compared to him, that's just the way it is in boxing." Williams is the first to admit he is no "Hitman" when it comes to knocking people out with one crushing blow. "I've got power, but I won't say I can hit like he did. But I can punch," Williams said.

The young Georgian has gotten most of his 22 stoppages by throwing an unusually large number of punches per round, basically wearing his opponent down. Against Mathysse, for example, CompuBox stats show Williams threw 1,036 punches in just a minute under 10 full rounds, of which 555 were jabs. That's an average of more than 100 punches per round.

To put that in recent context, when Vernon Forrest beat Ike Quartey on Aug.5, the announced winner threw a total of 818 punches to the Ghanaian's 481. The combined total punches thrown for two former champions who both are known to be aggressive was 1,299. In the co-feature that fight, former champion Kasim Ouma, who has set CompuBox records in the past, threw 1,043 in 10 rounds to beat Sechew Powell. Williams' 100 punches per round against Matthysse, while impressive, was well below the average trainer Peterson makes him throw in sparring sessions, and therein lies a story.

"When Paul first came to me he had agility, but no power," Peterson said. "His punches were like slaps. So I decided that without the power, I wanted him to concentrate on winning every round. I said, 'I want you to throw 150 punches a round. I never saw a fighter throw that many and lose a fight.

"So we worked on that. Sometimes he would come back to the corner and I'd tell him, you didn't throw 150 punches, you threw 125. I had no idea, of course, but I told him I had a man counting the punches."

Peterson marvels at how easily Williams takes instruction. The last three times a Williams fight went the distance, for example, he won a combined total of 26 of 28 rounds, just two short of his trainer's mandate. "Once we had the high punch count down, I started to teach him about power, how to get his body -- his neck, shoulders and hips -- behind those punches," Peterson said.

First time out of the box as a pro, on July 21, 2000, Williams followed instructions to the letter, with almost dire consequences for his opponent, one Jeremy Mickelson, of Fort Bragg, N.C.

"The fight was in the kid's (Mickelson) backyard (Greensboro, N.C.)," Peterson recalled. "The ref was naïve. Paul was busting him up badly, but the ref didn't stop the fight because the fans wanted it to go on. They were all figuring Paul was going to tire himself out, that he couldn't keep up the pace."

Williams lasted the four-rounder easily, threw his 600 or so punches and Mickelson wound up in the hospital, luckily not seriously injured.

Mitchell, however, is not a Mickelson. Of Mitchell's five career losses, all came at the hands of boxers who were then, or would be future champions – Stevie Johnston, the late Leavander Johnson, Kostya Tszyu twice, and Mayweather. The combined records of his three opponents beside Tszyu at the time they fought was 66-0. Tszyu was 25-1 the first time Mitchell lost to him, 30-1 the second.

Surprisingly, neither Williams nor Peterson see Mitchell as much of a step up. "Sharmba is not in my class" Williams said flatly.

"Sharmba is activity for us," Peterson added, "a busy fight to keep us in business until we can get Margarito." Watch out what you wish for, you might just get it guys. "Antonio is trying to fight every six months now," Diaz said. "If Paul keeps winning, Antonio will be glad to fight him."

If Williams keeps throwing a thousand punches and winning his bouts, the fearless Margarito may be the only welterweight champion around eager to fight him. Call it a "rematch." To be continued...