Top Rank CEO Bob Arum is taking a “wait and see” approach regarding if Paul “The Punisher” Williams will be a possible opponent for Manny Pacquiao next year.
Pacquiao is deep in training camp for his November 13 PPV fight against Antonio Margarito for the WBC junior middleweight championship. A win, and Pacquiao will have secured a major title in his seventh weight class.
If that happens, the next move would be to attempt a third negotiation for the Mayweather-Pacquiao superfight. But due to Mayweather’s recent legal problems with a domestic violence arrest, Arum has to prepare back-up opponents. On that list would have to be Top 10 pound for pound fighter and former welterweight titlist Paul Williams.
Arum is on record as stating Manny Pacquiao is the best fighter he’s ever promoted, listing him over previous legends like Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard. But Arum believes Williams’ size would likely be too much for the 5’6, Filipino star.
One of the problems in a Paul Williams fight is it’s one thing to go up in weight and fight these big guys, but he’s 5’6 barely and he’d be fighting a guy that’s almost 6’3,” Arum told AOL Fanhouse. “Now that doesn’t sound like it’ll make a great fight but we’ll see.”
Williams’ last fight was in May at a 154 pounds, when he won a technical decision over Kermit Cintron. He sat out the majority of this year trying to secure a big name welterweight fight against Manny Pacquiao or Shane Mosley. Neither obliged, and Williams signed on for a middleweight rematch on November 20 against Sergio Martinez.
At press time, Paul Williams could not be reached for comment.
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I’ll give Arum some props for at least being polite in his response. But let’s get real. Arum will match Pacquiao through his entire stable at 154 and 147 before he’ll even consider looking at a Paul Williams.
I would have loved to see Williams completing a modern today Fab Four by having a round robin with Mayweather, Mosley and Pacquiao. But unlike those guys, Williams has been unable to amass a fan following to create a demand for those type of matchups. Mayweather, for example, fought Mosley partly because the public would not have accepted any other matchup outside of Pacquiao. Williams, for all his weight-jumping between welterweight and middleweight, has yet to get himself in that position. It seemed that he was close to breaking through with a Mosley bout, but Sugar Shane’s trainer Naazim Richardson nixed the idea, claiming Williams is really a legit middleweight and too big for his fighter.
What can Paul Williams do? In my opinion, his future is at middleweight. His team should focus on trying to build him into the dominant middleweight champ that Jermain Taylor and Kelly Pavlik failed to be. Last month, Williams’ trainer George Peterson compared his charge to Marvin Hagler. That would be an excellent way to market the Punisher, as a hard-nosed, avoided fighter who took the hard way to the championship.
Finally, Williams’ team should take a page out of Bob Arum’s book. Antonio Margarito’s profile was raised considerably by how Arum painted him as the most avoided man in boxing. He cited Mayweather’s decision to turn down an $8 million dollar offer as the backbone for that opinion. The fans today are just as interested in the contract issues as the actual fights, so if Williams’s team started to expose these alleged contract offers, it would create a buzz around him.
The above ideas may not make Paul Williams a superstar, but it’ll at least make him a better known fighter. But before all of that, he needs to be 100% focused on taking care of business November 20 with Sergio Martinez. That fight stylistically will be the toughest of his career.
Beats, Boxing and Mayhem 