A brief round-up of the weekend's action;

WILLIAMS EDGES MARTINEZ

Paul Williams' majority decision victory Saturday over Sergio Martinez, a fight that many boxing scribes scored for Martinez, joins Marquez-Diaz and Taylor-Froch as the finalists for Fight of the Year.

It always helps the Fight-of-the-Year cause when the first round features knockdowns by both fighters, Williams winging an off-balance Martinez at mid-round but going down near the end from a beautiful right hook, one of many Martinez landed in the first three rounds.

So already the scoring in Atlantic City was an issue. Most scribes scored the first round 9-9, because Williams surely would have been accorded a 10-8 round had he not hit the deck himself. But if Martinez clearly won the round overall in one's estimation, then he certainly led 30-27 after three rounds.

Never mind that judge Pierre Benoist scored the bout a preposterous 119-111 for Williams. The other scorecards were Lynne Carter's 115-113 vote for Williams and Julie Lederman's 114-114, the fairest decision of all. (Julie's father, Harold Lederman, scored it 115-113 Williams on the official HBO broadcast).

Williams, who took the fight to Martinez throughout, did so quite effectively in the middle rounds, establishing that trend at the end of the fourth with the best punch of the fight, a straight left, and dominating through the seventh.

But Martinez landed most of the clean punches in the fight, the best of those from the eighth round on being counter lefts that re-established his superiority. However, Williams' greater stamina may have looked better to the judges in the 11th and 12th than Martinez's less numerous power shots.

The ambiguities of Williams-Martinez, as well as the excitement, place it above the Juan Manuel Marquez-Juan Diaz fight last winter and the Jermain Taylor-Carl Froch turnaround in April. Clouding our judgment of those fights, Marquez, Diaz, Taylor and Froch have not fared well since.

Saturday's fight was the most brutal of the three. Williams was particularly battered in the aftermath, from punches and one notable head butt. The thing the improbably long left-hander proved more than anything else is that he can take a middleweight punch and dish one out, too.

But Williams isn't going to seem invincible much longer sustaining that kind of abuse.