Boxing

Winky's win not convincing to all

By JOHN C. COTEY
Published December 12, 2005

UNCASVILLE, Conn. - Despite a cold that landed him in the hospital Dec. 5 and forced him to stop doing interviews, not to mention the general malaise surrounding a fight no one seems to care much about, St. Petersburg's Winky Wright did what he had to Saturday night.

He won.

Apparently, that isn't going to be good enough for everyone. Then again, it never is in a boxing culture that stresses style over substance and knockouts over 12-round beatdowns.

"Close fight or whatever, I know I won that fight," said Wright (50-3, 25 knockouts), who beat Sam Soliman by unanimous decision at the Mohegan Sun Arena.

Afterward, Wright, 34, began the push for a bout with WBC and WBA middleweight champion Jermain Taylor (25-0, 17 KOs).

Taylor's promoter, Lou DiBella, immediately went on the counteroffensive.

"You think Jermain is afraid of this guy?" he told fightnews.com shortly after watching Saturday's bout. "That fight was much too close. I applaud Sam Soliman for his tremendous level of conditioning, but he was basically an amateurish fighter."

DiBella is downplaying Wright's claim to a shot at the 27-year-old Taylor's WBC and WBA middleweight titles. The scores by the judges - 115-112, 115-113 and 117-110 - ensured that Wright remains the mandatory challenger in both sanctioning bodies, meaning Taylor will have to fight Wright eventually or lose his title belts.

Eventually seems to be the key word for DiBella, who's made it no secret he wants Taylor fighting someone else this spring.

"We'll fight him when it makes sense," DiBella said. "This was just ... put it this way, when you have 4,000 people in a 10,000 seat arena and they're booing at the end, it doesn't do anything to build anticipation for this fight."

DiBella apparently has forgotten that Taylor beat 40-year-old Bernard Hopkins (46-4-1, 32 KOs) in heavily disputed decisions in two of the most boring pay-per-view fights of the year, and fans booed at times during each bout.

DiBella would like Taylor to fight a lesser opponent this spring in his hometown of Little Rock, Ark., but they would have to offer Wright step-aside money to do so or risk being stripped of their WBC title. If that's arranged, then Wright would fight a tuneup as well, in April or May and possibly at the St. Pete Times Forum in Tampa, promoter Gary Shaw said.

Wright and Taylor would then be scheduled for late summer.

"HBO only wants the best fights," Shaw said. "I know Jermain Taylor, and I think Jermain has pride and he wants people to say he's the best middleweight in the world, and they can't do that until he fights Winky Wright."

While the fans did boo Saturday's decision, as DiBella said, it was because expectations were extremely low for the 32-year-old Soliman (31-8, 12 KOs), an Australian who won them over by surviving and throwing an amazing 1,260 punches.

But that stat is misleading: only 174 of those punches landed, meaning 1,086 missed, a remarkably bad percentage even against the best defensive fighter in the sport today.

Wright threw "only" 625 punches, but landed 300, almost twice as many as Soliman. And Wright staggered Soliman on a few occasions, clearly landing the more meaningful blows.

He's been criticized for being too one-dimensional, but fought toe-to-toe with Soliman all night. He's been criticized for relying too much on one punch, the right jab, but Saturday night ripped some big shots to the body and had his straight left working.

And he's been criticized for failing to knock out lesser opponents, but ... okay, so everything didn't go as well as it could have.

"He was real sick all week," trainer Dan Birmingham said. "But I thought he did a great job putting that out of his head and sucking it up. It shouldn't have been that close on the cards. That was no two-point fight."

[Last modified December 12, 2005, 01:11:08]