"Anytime, anyplace, anybody"

Mark Ortega

You used to hear the phrase “Any time, any place, anybody” a whole lot in boxing. For one reason or another that slogan hasn’t been applicable to the sport in quite awhile, but in newly-crowned WBO Interim Junior Middleweight champion Paul Williams and undefeated American heavyweight sensation Chris Arreola, Goossen-Tutor Promotions has two fighters that this moniker can be applied to.

Between the two of them, they fought eight times in 2008, seven of those bouts being nationally televised. Williams has even fought at three different weight classes this year alone, something that has been sight unseen in decades.

In how it has been so easy to keep these two fighters so active, Goossen-Tutor Promotions head Dan Goossen had this to say: “It takes two to come up with the decisions and that’s the business side of the fighters, meaning manager Al Haymon, the trainer in both Henry Ramirez and George Peterson, and then the fighters and ourselves.”

A case could be made that Arreola should be fighting that many times a year anyways since he has yet to reach the top of the hill, but Williams was in the ring four times this year after picking up a world title in July of last year when he knocked off the heavily avoided Antonio Margarito for his WBO welterweight crown. Williams and his team have to be commended for even fighting Margarito in the first place. As we have seen in the case of Andre Berto, there is a much easier route to a world championship than fighting a man whose last loss against an opponent at 147 pounds came in 1996, when Margarito was barely eighteen years old.

Considering the result of the fight, a unanimous decision victory for Williams, his team knew what they were doing in putting him in the ring with Margarito. The victory instantly catapulted Williams to elite status and put him in talks concerning who the best 147-pounder in the world was. Many thought his team was crazy for throwing Williams into a fight with Margarito.

“There comes a point where you take that next step towards your goal and the time was right to do it at that point,” said Goossen. “Paul proved us right and it’s one of the great things about great fighters is that they make us look like geniuses,” Goossen said.

Following the Margarito win, Williams had a bit of a letdown when he lost a unanimous decision to Carlos Quintana in February of this year. Williams was originally slated to take on Kermit Cintron in an IBF/WBO unification bout, but when Cintron hurt his hand in a November fight with Jesse Feliciano, Quintana became the opponent. Regardless of how the fight came to be, Williams dropped a tough decision, but did not hang his head for long. He was back in the ring again in June, against the only man to hand Williams a professional loss. Williams went right after Quintana and scored a thrilling first round knockout, completely erasing his lone professional defeat.

With everybody at the top either avoiding Williams or fighting each other, Williams took a tune-up fight, but it came with a twist. Williams stepped in the ring again in September, fighting two weight-classes above where he was a world champion. His opponent was a capable one in Andy Kolle, whose only loss came at the hands of another Goossen fighter, 2004 Gold Medalist Andre Ward. Williams blasted Kolle out within a round, leaving fans wondering where he could go next. Not many fighters open a door wide enough for themselves where they can say they can legitimately fight for a world title in three different weight classes, but Williams took advantage of this. In his most recent bout just this past weekend, Williams picked up the WBO Interim 154-pound title against Verno Phillips, and in the process became the first man to stop the rugged Phillips in twenty years.

The most important thing to take away from Williams’ busy schedule is that all four of his bouts this year were nationally televised. He fought on HBO twice, Showtime once, and his tune-up bout with Kolle was televised by Versus. In order for boxing to fully develop “stars”, this is something that needs to be done. Fighting four times a year, on national television, can only do positive things to increase the awareness of a fighter.

Just look at what it has done to the career of Chris Arreola. In 2008, he went from being called a second-tier heavyweight by some to being universally recognized as the United States’ best heavyweight. His two biggest wins, over Chazz Witherspoon (23-0 at the time) and now Travis Walker (28-1-1 at the time) were both on HBO’s Boxing After Dark. His fight against Israel Garcia (19-1) was on Versus. Arreola’s weight problems have been well documented in the past. In his own words, Arreola says he needs to fight four or five times a year, otherwise he gets lazy. In his fight against Garcia, he was heavily chastised by the press for coming in 258 pounds, a career high. The criticism only forced Arreola to drop down to 254 for his win over Walker this past weekend. Arreola has stated in the past that for a fight with the Klitschkos he knows he would need to come to fight in much better shape. His fight with Witherspoon has shown that he is capable of working hard for a big enough fight, as he came into that contest (which was almost a pick’em fight) weighing 239 pounds.

Arreola coming in heavy for the Walker fight did have people wondering, especially after the beating he took through one and a half rounds at the hands of the 12-to-1 underdog Walker, if it was a huge issue. Arreola seemingly enjoyed taking some brutal punishment, and in his words this was his way of studying his opponent. “I wanted to see what kinds of punches he threw, whether they were looping punches or good straight punches,” said Arreola in response to why his defense was so poor early in the fight. It seems to be a much tougher way to learn how your opponent fights; most fighters seem to study their opponent on film rather than waiting to see what they offer them in the ring. That Arreola dealt with adversity in being knocked down by Walker in the second, only to come back and floor him twice in the same round, drew a positive reaction to the crowd. Arreola’s camp is happy that the adversity came in a fight like this rather than in a big fight that could happen down the road.

“That’s what a fighter or any athlete needs. You got to know how to come back from being 15 points down in the fourth quarter, or 5 points down at the end of a basketball game or a few runs down in the 9th and the only way to do that is to overcome it,” says Goossen. He continued, “And the best place to overcome that is on the way there and not when you get there.”

Another reason why this fighter has become so popular is the excitement he brings with him into the ring. In 26 fights, the distance has only been seen once, and that was in a six-round fight coming off a layoff, where he “surprisingly” weighed 256 pounds. His win over Witherspoon was all but officially a knockout, as Witherspoon was in shape to continue but was ruled disqualified when someone from his corner entered the ring. Another win of Arreola’s came when his opponent was so afraid of him in the ring he was disqualified for holding excessively and hitting on the break. Other than that, Arreola opponents have come into the ring only to crushingly get knocked out.

Arreola is not quite yet for a fight against either Klitschko, but what is great about the guy is that there are so many fights out there for him that the fans would love to see. Fights against guys like Eddie Chambers [32-1, 18 KOs] and Malik Scott [31-0, 11 KOs] would help make Arreola’s case as the best heavyweight in the States. Fights against Lamon Brewster [34-4, 30 KOs] and Oleg Maskaev [35-6, 26 KOs] would provide fireworks regardless of who wins. James Toney [70-6-3, 43 KOs] and Hasim Rahman [45-6-2, 36 KOs] would be tough tests for Arreola as experienced heavyweights. Of course the fight that everyone would love to see is Arreola taking on the United Kingdom’s David Haye [22-1, 21 KOs], who just had his first true test at heavyweight after completely cleaning out the cruiserweight division. The important thing is, there are very few places that Goossen-Tutor could go with Arreola that would leave me disappointed.

They have the same “problem” with Williams. Now that he is an active fighter in three different weight classes (147, 160, and now 154), there are lots of options for him out there. Two of them have all but been officially nixed as bouts with Antonio Margarito [37-5, 27 KOs], the WBA welterweight champion, and Vernon Forrest [41-3, 29 KOs], the once-again WBC junior middleweight champion, have roadblocks that prevent them from happening. With Margarito, it has been made public that Bob Arum, head of Top Rank and Margarito’s promoter, does not want to have anything to do with Williams’ camp again after negotiations broke down between the two sides on a proposed fight between Williams and middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik.. A fight with Forrest does not look likely because both he and Williams are managed by Al Haymon.

Both fights could be big if they were somehow to be made. A rematch with Margarito would without a doubt determine the best 147-pounder in the world. A unification fight with Forrest could be big if held in Georgia, the home state for both fighters. Even with those two fights having a limited chance of being made, there are still other places Paul Williams could go that would satisfy the fans.

By becoming the interim WBO 154-pound champion, Williams becomes the mandatory to the undefeated WBO champion from Germany, Sergei Dzinziruk [36-0, 22 KOs]. Dzinziruk stated that he would like to fight Williams, but after he gets a unification bout with the WBA champion Daniel Santos [32-3-1, 23 KOs], a rematch from 2005 that saw Santos lose a close decision in Germany. Dzinziruk even said he would come to America for a Williams fight. At welterweight, there are matchups with IBF champion Joshua Clottey [35-2, 20 KOs] and WBC champion Andre Berto [23-0, 19 KOs] that could help clear up the picture at 147-pounds while a Margarito rematch lingers. There are also guys in the top ten or fifteen that would give Williams a test (much like Verno Phillips did) that include former-titlists Zab Judah [37-6, 25 KOs], Kermit Cintron [30-2, 27 KOs], and Shane Mosley [45-5, 38 KOs].

“All of those fights are on the table with us and what we’ll do is take the biggest one. That is what we are doing is looking for the biggest fights,” said Goossen.

It will be interesting to see where these two fighters go from here, because there are so many paths they can take. What you have are two fighters that stay active, take on all comers, and that also have great personalities. Arreola is a writer’s dream and as quotable of a fighter as there has been in recent times. Williams is a very humble person with a quiet confidence of himself wherever he is. It has been awhile since there have been two fighters in a situation like this. Hopefully this time the opportunity does not get squandered, like it has many times in the past. But if 2008 was any indication of what is still to come, then boxing fans are in for a treat.