Punished

Giants over Pats? Quintana over Williams? Man. All I can say is watch your back Kelly Pavlik, because something freaky-deeky is in the air out there.

People, as my Williams/Quintana prognostification would indicate (so much for my ridiculous swami run), I did not see this coming for the life of me. I wouldn't put it in the same category of upset as last week's Super Bowl shocker, but it's not too far out of that stratosphere either. I mean, 8-1 is an upset of note, no doubt.

And now all of us boxing pundits and fans are left shaking our heads, because this was not your typical "exposure" type of upset, the type of upset that Carlos Quintana handed out to the Love Child Joel Julio two summers ago - young highly-regarded up-and-comer who hasn't fought anyone of substance gets exposed by a savvy veteran who has more left on the fastball than anyone realized.

No, this fight isn't in that league for one very simple reason - in Paul Williams' last outing he beat Antonio Freakin Margarito, beat him cleanly in what to my mind was a brilliant all-around performance. Most people rate Margarito amongst the class of the welterweight division, a division that right now is the class of boxing. In the winter of '06 and early in '07, much was made in the sweet science rumor mills that King Floyd himself was ducking Margarito, that Bob Arum had offered Floyd $8 million to fight the Mexican and Floyd had passed. Margarito himself passed on a fight with Miguel Cotto last summer, and the consensus opinion on that move was that he was hoping to build his star so he could make more money in that and other mega-bouts to come (obviously that didn't work out too well for him). Now Margarito has a rematch with Kermit Cintron in April on the Cotto/Gomez undercard, and if he and Cotto both win that night, it seems very likely that they will meet in a big fight this summer. Yesterday morning, I think most of us boxing fans would have said that a Cotto/Margarito fight would be a highly competitive affair, a hell of a fight.

You see where I'm going with this? In that Cotto absolutely pulverized Quintana in December of '06, and now Quintana has pantsed Williams, who himself handled Margarito... how exactly are we supposed to gauge the whole 147 scene? On my scorecard last night, I had Quintana winning 115-113, and it wasn't nearly that close because the seven rounds I had Quintana winning, he destroyed Williams, whereas the five rounds I gave Williams were very close, low-output rounds that I gave him largely because of Quintana's exhausted inactivity. Overall, Williams looked slow, inaccurate, awkward, tremendously easy to hit, and his punches, never known as man-wreckers in the first place, were woefully ineffectual.

I ask you - is this the same man that convincingly beat Antonio Margarito last July? What the hell is going on here?

Let me offer two theories:

• At welterweight right now there are two supremely great fighters - Floyd and Cotto. A step below those two you have Sugar Shane, and below him you have everyone else, Margarito, Williams, Cintron, Judah, even Quintana, all in a distant third-place tie and really not that far removed from each other, such on that on any given night any one of them might beat another if they're feeling it. To prove this theory, the true litmus test would be Quintana/Margarito. If Quintana gave Margarito a battle, we would know all we needed to know. If he didn't, we could draw either of these two conclusions - Margarito was way off his game against Williams while Williams fought the bout of his life, or Williams was in similarly bad shape last night while Quintana was at his best.
• During the telecast, I only heard Harold Lederman allude in passing to a fact that for me has huge implications for Williams' showing. His official weight was 146 1/2, and he fought last night at 164. I have asked myself before with Williams how long he could maintain his freakish 6'1"-147 stature, and now I wonder if that hourglass hasn't run out on him. He certainly had the slow, zipless, plodding aspect last night that often characterizes fighters who have cut weight dramatically. And if he's putting on close to 18 pounds in a day, it's not just cause he's pulling an all-nighter at Bob's Big Boy. A lot of that is water, and wringing yourself dry quite literally drains you. What you lose you can't put back in one night. I'm sure his handlers want to keep him at 147 because they figure, hey, guy's got very little power at this weight, how will he fare if he moves up? Then again, if making the weight is sapping all his strength, maybe he gets some of that pop back if he doesn't have to cut that last seven pounds.
  

Final analysis - hats off to Carlos Quintana. He was motivated and undaunted and he looked like a world-beater in there. I'm sure he earned himself a big payday sometime soon - I have to believe there are lot of big-name 147's who will line up around the block to fight him now, and maybe he'll surprise one of those cocky bastards as well. I did have to laugh, though, at the look on Quintana's face when Kellerman brought up a potential Cotto rematch - "dah... maybe not." Kellerman himself said it best later on - MAN does Cotto come out of this looking huge. Here we were all thinking 147 was a packed division full of great potential match-ups and now it's looking more like men's tennis circa 1980. There's Borg and McEnroe... and then a bunch of Roscoe Tanners.

(I'm not going to waste too much cyberspace on Andre Berto's win over Michel Trabant. It was a non-fight, plain and simple. Trabant shouldn't have been anywhere near that ring. I will say this, however - I was on the whole unimpressed with Berto last night. He did nice work battering Trabant and finding his holes through the ear-muff defense, but Trabant also was bringing some of the laziest, punk-assenest one-twos I've ever seen at this level of boxing, and Berto was clueless on how to counter him. I like Berto, I really do, but when he does make the big step up, I'm afraid he gonna get a beatdown. Like in, say, a bout with Zab? Man, I think Zab handles Berto without a lot of trouble right now.)