By Scott Gilfoid: Amir Khan doesn’t see a fight between IBF welterweight champion Shawn Porter (24-0-1, 15 KO’s) and #1 IBF Kell Brook (32-0, 22 KO’s) will take place in July, as the International Boxing Federation has ordered. Khan believes that Brook doesn’t have the stomach for the fight after watching the magnificent job that Porter did on Paulie Malignaggi in stopping him in 4th round last April.
“Brook-Porter is not going to happen because Kell doesn’t think he can win it,” Khan said via BBC Sport. “I don’t think Kell has got the bottle to take a big fight like that; he’s always been all talk when it comes to the big fights. Some fighters are like that.”
If Brook turns this fight down, he’s probably going to be waiting a long time for another title shot because he’ll likely see himself get dropped downward in the rankings by the sanctioning bodies. Brook can certainly target WBA/WBC champion Floyd Mayweather Jr, but he’s not going to burn up a fight against an unknown like Brook. That’s why Brook has little choice but to take the fight with Porter or else move up in weight to 154. I honestly don’t see Brook doing too well at 154 either. You put him in with Erislandy Lara or Demetrius Andrade, and he’s going to go through hard times. We’re not taking Matthew Hatton and Carson Jones here.
In fairness to Brook, he was on the verge of fighting former IBF welterweight champion Devon Alexander a year ago, but Brook’s body kept betraying him during training for the fight. The mind was willing but the flesh was weak, so the fight never happened. But, yeah, Brook has had a career’s worth of weak opponents, and you got to wonder what the deal is with the lack of progression with his career. I mean, it’s like Brook was started out at the lower level and instead of pushed up after 2-3 years, he was kept at that level for some reason. Now he’s been as pro for 10 years, and sadly he’s still being matched against weak opposition.
In Brook’s last fight he was put in with some little known fighter named Alvaro Robles. It’s mind boggling that his promoter Eddie Hearn would make a fight like that with a 10 year and with a fighter ranked at No.1 the way Brook is. In Brook’s previous fight, Hearn matched him against 35-year-old veteran Vyacheslav Senchenko in another disappointing fight. Senchenko may have been a champion at one point in his career, but he never fought anyone good to become the WBA champion, and he was soundly beaten when he fought his first semi-decent opponent in Paulie Malignaggi. That right there exposed Senchenko in the minds of a lot of boxing fans as him being a paper champion. But it was strange how Hearn got excited about the Senchenko-Brook fight, as if he were matching Brook against Floyd Mayweather Jr. instead of an aging fighter in his mid-30s who had been blasted out by Malignaggi, and who had struggled against a ring rusty Ricky Hatton before stopping him with a body shot.
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