By Scott Gilfoid: Next month former WBO 140 pound champion Chris Algieri (20-1, 8 KOs) will be looking to knock Amir Khan (30-3, 19 KOs) down a peg in their fight on 5/29 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.
Algieri, 31, has very little pressure on him compared to Khan because he’s already had his big payday fight against Manny Pacquiao last November and was totally spanked.
Khan is the one who badly wants a big payday fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. But for Khan to get that big fight, he’s got to keep winning and he’s got to impress every time out. He not only has to win, but he’s to look superb in doing so.
If Khan puts in another horrible performance like he did against Julio Diaz and Lamont Peterson, he can forget about ever getting Mayweather to throw him a bone and give him a fight finally. Personally, I don’t see Mayweather ever agreeing to fight Khan because he’s got too much of a negative fighting style.
All that holding and shoving, it’s so off putting. We are talking about the star of boxing when we’re talking about Mayweather. Now if Khan were to start standing in the pocket and making himself vulnerable for 12 rounds, I think he would get the Mayweather fight in no time, but definitely not with the way he’s fighting now.
Agieri wants to whip Khan and look like a diamond while doing so. Algieri’s loss to Pacquiao was so incredibly one-sided that he now has to climb his way back from that defeat by showing boxing fans that he’s not the guy that Pacquiao knocked down six times and toyed with for 12 rounds. Some fans feel that Pacquiao showed mercy on Algieri by not knocking him out when he could have many times over in the fight.
“This is a tough fight but a fight I wanted and one that coach and I believe will bring out the absolute best in me,” Algieri said via Fightnews.com. “May 29th you will see the best Chris Algieri you have ever seen.”
Algieri is now being trained by John David Jackson, the same guy that trains Sergey Kovalev. I don’t know what Algieri is expecting from Jackson, but hopefully he’s got his feet on the ground and realizes that he’s not going to turn him into a knockout artist like Kovalev. You’ve got to have the basic tools walking into the door, and I don’t see those tools in Algieri’s toolkit.
It kind of goes without saying that Algieri was picked out by Khan because of his lack of punching power. I mean, Khan picked Algieri out of the bunch to fight when there was a mess of other top contenders available that had much better power than him. Khan probably could have gotten a fight against the likes of Kell Brook, Keith Thurman, Marcos Maidana, Lucas Matthysse, Ruslan Provodnikov, Lamont Peterson and Diego Chaves, yet he chose Algieri instead.
The bad news for Khan is if he gets beaten up and stopped by Algieri on May 29th, then he’s going to be seen as a washed up fighter by a lot of boxing fans. It is one thing getting smacked around by Danny Garcia and Breidis Prescott, and quite another thing entirely Khan getting pulverized by Algieri. But that doesn’t mean Khan’s career would be over. No, it just means that he could forget all about getting a fight against Mayweather. It would probably ruin his chances for a fight against Pacquiao as well, even though Pacquiao could use an opponent like Khan to make it interesting in between rematches against the likes of Brandon Rios and Tim Bradley.
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