By Scott Gilfoid: Amir Khan got some bad news last Friday with the announcement by Floyd Mayweather Jr of his mega-fight with Manny Pacquiao for May 2nd in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Khan, 28, had been sitting on the sidelines for the past three months waiting to possibly get a fight against Mayweather or Pacquiao for May. Now Khan finds himself left out in the cold and needing to scrape up his own fight. However, Khan still hasn’t given up hopes of fighting the two superstars, as he thinks he has a good chance of fighting the winner of the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight.
I’m not so sure that Khan get his wish, because unless he faces someone really, really good in his next fight and picks up a victory, he’ll still likely remain an unknown among the casual boxing fans in the United States.
The soft match-making that’s been done for Khan since his knockout loss to Danny Garcia in 2012 has actually worked against the British fighter by keeping him an unknown among the casual boxing fans in America.
In the U.S get what you put into your career. If you want to become a star over there, you have to fight the best and beat them. You can’t fight the type of guys that Khan has been fighting and think you’re going to become a star on the cheap. It’s not done like that in the U.S.
“Mayweather announces he’s fighting Manny Pacquiao. Good luck, guys. A fight we all been waiting for,” Khan said on his twitter on Friday.
It’s nice that Khan isn’t sounding bitter about being passed over by Mayweather and Pacquiao for a fight. But I see Khan’s attitude changing in the future if he fails to get the winner of the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight, because he seems to be under the impression that he’ll be getting a chance to fight the winner.
I don’t think either of these guys have any serious interest in fighting Khan, because there are other guys who bring much more to the table in terms of their popularity in the States, so it’s not really worthwhile to fight Khan. He needs to become popular in the U.S for him to be a viable opponent for either Mayweather or Pacquiao, and the only way Khan can become popular is to start facing high caliber fighters instead of the guys that his adviser Al Haymon has been digging up for him in the last three years.
“For the winner or the loser, it would be a massive fight. Manny and Mayweather are huge names in boxing. I think I am on their radar,” Khan said via Skysports.com. “It puts me in a great position, that great performance in my last fight against Devon Alexander.”
I hate to be the one to break this to Khan, but his win over Devon Alexander doesn’t put him in any kind of position for a Mayweather or Pacquiao fight. That was yet another soft opponent for Khan, because Alexander can’t punch, and he’d been recently badly beaten by Shawn Porter in a real beat down.
By fighting Alexander, Khan got sloppy seconds against a fighter with no power. If Khan wants to put himself in a choice position to get a fight against the superstars in boxing, he’s going to need to beat guys like Lucas Matthysse, Danny Garcia, Keith Thurman, Tim Bradley, Kell Brook and Marcos Maidana.
Once Khan starts beating those guys, then I can see him getting the big names like Mayweather and Pacquiao. But unfortunately, I don’t see Khan getting matched up with any of those fighters.
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