Golden Boy has to pick Khan’s next opponent carefully

By Boxing News - 07/26/2012 - Comments

Image: Golden Boy has to pick Khan's next opponent carefullyBy William Mackay: WBA/WBC light welterweight champion Danny Garcia is now officially out of the picture for a December rematch with former IBF/WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan after the news was announced yesterday that the 24-year-old Garcia will be facing Erik Morales on October 20th in Brooklyn, New York.

Khan’s promoters at Golden Boy will now have to look around to put Khan in with someone that is well known, but at the same time not good enough to give Khan his third loss in a row.

Khan has been beaten by Lamont Peterson and Garcia in his last two fights. The Peterson fight was a bad one because of how Khan fell apart from the pressure that Peterson put on him in their fight last December. But Khan was able to get the boxing public to buy into a high number excuses that he made for losing that fight. However, there were no excuses that Khan could come up with for his 4th round TKO loss to Garcia last July 14th in Las Vegas, Nevada. Garcia put Khan down twice in the fight, and there wasn’t much Khan could say other than he made the mistake of trying to brawl with Garcia instead of boxing him.

With Garcia now out of the picture, Golden Boy is going to have to look for either an old toothless veteran that may still have some power, but who is now too shot to use it properly or they need to find another weak puncher like Paul McCloskey for Khan to look good against. They can’t put Khan in with anyone good that has power like Mike Alvarado, DeMarcus Corley or Kendall Holt, because they all have too much power and the chances would be high that Khan would get obliterated again even if he tried running, holding and jabbing. Sometimes when a fighter gets knocked silly in the way that Khan was against Garcia, it weakens their ability to take big shots in the future without getting getting hurt. So what we sometimes see is that fighter getting easily knocked out from shots they would have been able to handle in the past.

My personal recommendation is for Khan to be matched against one of the following fighters in December:

Albert Mensah
Humberto Soto
Vernon Paris
Mercito Gesta
Jorge Linares
Gavin Rees

If you’ve noticed, I’ve added some lightweights to the bunch. The reason I’ve done this is because Khan’s promoters have recently started matching fighters from different weight classes against each other. We’re seeing WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez facing light welterweight Josesito Lopez in September and WBA World welterweight champion Paulie Malignaggi fighting light welterweight Pablo Cesar Cano in October. Since Golden Boy is doing it with those fighters, they’ll likely do the same Khan in December by putting him in with a smaller fighter from a lower weight class.



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