(Notice Khan’s left arm holding Zab Judah’s head down while he gets ready to hit him with a right hand to the nads for a knockout blow. Good form, eh?) By Scott Gilfoid: In reading some of the things Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer said about his fighter Amir Khan’s shoving of his opponent Lamont Peterson and how Schaefer and Khan both didn’t see it as a foul, I wonder if Khan should be allowed to do this in his fights as often as he likes without having to worry about a referee taking points away from him in the future.

In looking at Khan’s past fights, I’ve noticed that pushing his opponents is a really huge part of his game. I didn’t realize how much Khan’s pushing was a part of his game until I looked at some of his past fights and discovered that Khan has been doing his shoving for quite some time.

Since the shoving and the head pulling down fouls are so ingrained in his fighting style, I think perhaps Khan should be given permission to continue to use these fouls to fight without having to worry about losing points or receiving warnings in the future. Think of it like a grandfather clause type situation.

One example of a grandfather clause was when the spitball was ruled illegal in 1920. At the time there were 17 older spit ball pitchers who relied on throwing the spitball in order to be effective. Since the spitball was such a huge part of their games the 17 pitchers were allowed to keep throwing spitballs after the spitball was prohibited in that year. I think it should be the same for Khan. Since shoving his opponents and grabbing their heads appear to be a big part of him being able to stop fighters from battering him on the inside, I think Khan should be allowed to shove and grab his opponents no matter how often he wants to do it.

It might be too hard for him to take those special illegal moves out of his game without crippling him as a fighter and boxing would lose a future star. I do think boxing needs to make shoving and grabbing a fighter’s head illegal or at least have referees that are versed enough in the rules of the sport to enforce them. However, I think Khan should be excluded from this rule because those tactics are too ingrained in his fighting style for him to succeed without them.

If they forced Khan to fight without fouling in this manner, I think it would be like breaking someone’s leg and sending them out to run a 100 meter sprint. It just wouldn’t go well for them. This is why I think there needs to be a grandfather clause in Khan’s case in terms of his two most common fouls of shoving and grabbing the head so he can continue to do this as often as he’d like, while the rest of the boxing world cuts down on these fouls from younger fighters.