With a Wink, and a nod to him, boxing’s 154-pound division unified its titles with one champion Saturday, while its presumed future came unraveled as an underdog ascended to the throne.
Ronald “Winky” Wright was patient and precise Saturday night, taking advantage of his long-awaited opportunity on center stage. The slick southpaw outfought fellow champion Shane Mosley, a fighter known for the speed and volume of his punches in the ring, to get the nod in a convincing unanimous decision.
Before the 12-round bout was over, with Mosley hanging tough and slugging toe-to-toe to win the final three minutes on the judges’ cards, Wright repeatedly heard chants of “Winky! Winky! Winky!” from an appreciative crowd of 9,017 at the 12,000-capacity Mandalay Bay Events Center.
Mosley might have heard the sound of all the chickens he counted before they hatched, all the anticipated riches falling from his grasp.
Favored by nearly 3-1 to beat Wright, Mosley already had announced plans to advance from a victory Saturday to a showdown this fall against former champion Felix Trinidad, who would come out of retirement for a big payday.
The plan was for Mosley to carry the title belts he won from Oscar De La Hoya and Wright into the ring against Trinidad and carry out a proposed $10 million, win or lose.
All of that changed Saturday night. Mosley left the ring with a third loss in his illustrious career, handing his World Boxing Association and World Boxing Council title belts to Wright.
Mosley walked away with his $2.1 million share of the purse. But it was a far cry from the $10 million that awaited against Trinidad. It was even further from the estimated $12 million Mosley could have made by fighting De La Hoya a third time after upsetting him twice.
Instead, Mosley took the Wright fight, which turned out to be the wrong fight for him and his bank account.
But in the face of all that money talk, Mosley deserves mountains of credit for doing the right thing competitively for boxing . . . namely, giving a long-deserving challenger a title shot.
Mosley steadfastly declared his quest to unify his titles with the International Boxing Federation belt held by Wright was “chasing history.” And Wright, the joyous victor, was more than satisfied with his $800,000 share of Saturday’s purse and hold on bragging rights as the unified champion.
It seemingly didn’t even bother him that his promoter and fellow champion Roy Jones Jr. didn’t come to Las Vegas or make a congratulatory call afterward. “He must be messin’ with his chickens,” Wright quipped about Jones’ passion for gamecocks.
After hugging Mosley, saying he would honor a rematch clause, and thanking him again for giving him the opportunity to win such a big fight, Wright joked about his long career in relative obscurity. “I’ve been fighting in places y’all can’t even pronounce,” he said of his bouts in locales such as Levallois Peret in France, Tucuman in Argentina and Hammanskraal in South Africa.
Wright, 32, nicknamed Winky by his grandmother, is the same age as Mosley. But while Mosley began his professional career as a 135-pound lightweight and moved up over 11 years, Wright has fought at 154 pounds for his entire 14-year career. He looked stronger than Mosley from the outset Saturday night, and his stinging right-hand jabs soon slowed Mosley’s speed advantage and enabled Wright to begin scoring with hard lefts to the head.
“He was very fast, but I was blocking him with my jab,” Wright said of the first round, which Mosley won. “It was just a matter of catching up.”
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How well he did catch up was evidenced by judges Chuck Giampa and Dave Moretti scoring nine of the 12 rounds for Wright, while he won eight on judge Paul Smith’s card. Ringside punch counts kept by HBO’s telecast team showed Wright outpunching Mosley 761-618, and outlanding him 250-166, including 90 jabs to just 30 for Mosley.
Pondering the future, Wright said he wanted to fight Trinidad first, then a rematch against Mosley, and then De La Hoya and Bernard Hopkins: “That’s it. Then I’m out of here.”
In reality, the Mosley rematch is most likely. With Trinidad-Mosley now diminished, Ricardo Mayorga is being mentioned as Trinidad’s next opponent. De La Hoya and Hopkins are aiming for a matchup in September after tuneup fights in June.
Mosley’s promoter, Gary Shaw, said late Saturday that he might want his fighter to take a confidence-restoring tuneup before a rematch. But right now, everyone else’s plans seem to leave Wright and Mosley as each other’s best prospective opponent.