Keith Thurman: Me and Kell Brook deserve Mayweather fight in September

By Boxing News - 06/20/2015 - Comments

thurman8888By Scott Gilfoid: WBA welterweight champion Keith Thurman doesn’t think Amir Khan deserves the fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. in September. Thurman notes that Khan hasn’t ever fought a strong punching welterweight, and the last time he fought a puncher in 2012, he was knocked out in the 4th round by light welterweight Danny Garcia.

Instead of Khan being the one to get the lucky lottery ticket for the Mayweather fight, Thurman thinks either himself of IBF welterweight champion Kell Brook should be the one that gets the fight.

“Outside of myself, and I am the highest ranked American fighter in the welterweight division today, I believe the most deserving would be Kell Brook,” Thurman said via Behind the Gloves. “He [Brook] deserves it, he has fought one good American fighter Shawn Porter and had a great performance.”

I’m not sure that Thurman is thinking too clearly before speaking. As far as Thurman goes, he already took himself out of the Mayweather lottery by making the blundering mistake of choosing to fight the aging Luis Collazo on July 11th. Talk about your silly moves.

By taking a fight against a 2nd tier fighter in Collazo, who no one wants to see Thurman fight, he’s made himself ineligible for the Mayweather fight in September. I mean, Mayweather isn’t going to be able to wait until July 11th before he makes his announcement for his September fight, because he’s going to need to let the fans know soon who his next opponent will be if he wants to be able to market it and train for the fight. As such, Thurman needs to take himself out of the equation when speaking about who should or shouldn’t be fighting Mayweather.

To be sure, Kell Brook has a glossy record at 35-0, 24 KOs, but he’s only fought one good opponent during his career in Shawn Porter, and he looked terrible in that fight. I had Porter winning a close decision. All Brook did was clinch all night long in holding 10+ times per round.

That’s a lot of holding, believe me. I thought it was one of the most boring fights I’ve seen before. Even if you want to pretend that Brook deserved the decision, he looked purely awful in that fight against Porter.

Do you really want a clincher like Brook fighting a star like Mayweather for his last fight? More importantly, Mayweather wants to fight someone that the American boxing public has actually heard of before, and Brook is unfortunately too unknown for Mayweather to waste time fighting. The same goes for Thurman.

Both of these guys have no fan base in the U.S, outside of the hardcore fans, and if Mayweather selects one of them, he’ll be looking at a fight that will be lucky if it bring sin 800,000 pay-per-view buys. That’s not good.

In my view, Khan, Thurman and Brook don’t rate a fight against Mayweather in September. They need to start fighting actual quality guys and looking good in doing so. Thurman has never fought a quality fighter, and he ran like crazy against Leonard Bundu in 2014. In Thurman’s last fight against Robert Guerrero, Thurman bragged about how he was going to stand in front of Guerrero for the first six rounds, but after the 4th, Thurman abandoned that strategy and ended up moving for the last eight rounds. It wasn’t interesting.

“I do believe Kell Brook deserves that over somebody like Amir Khan,” Thurman said.

I also believe that Brook is more deserving of a fight than Khan, but I like I said, Brook is totally unproven and looked terrible against his only good opponent he’s ever fought in Porter. All that awful holding that Brook did in that fight. His record is just filled with fluff from top to bottom. Seriously, I can’t believe Brook has wasted 11 years of his career fighting tune-ups. I think Brook’s record, once you remove all the wasted fluff opponents, is 0-1, because Porter is the only guy that rates as being a real fighter on Brook’s resume, and I totally had Brook losing that fight. I thought he should have been disqualified due to all the holding he was doing.



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