By Allan Fox: Former IBF/WBA 140lb champ Amir Khan (31-3, 19 KOs) is pretty excited about his potential fight with the 36-year-old former eight division world champion Manny Pacquiao (57-6-2, 38 KOs) on April 9th.
Despite Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum mentioning Terence Crawford frequently in the last two weeks as a strong candidate for Pacquiao’s fight on 4/9, Khan says that the negotiations are going really well between his management and Pacquiao’s.
Khan seems to think the fight will happen. With Khan’s track record for failing to get big fights in the past with Floyd Mayweather Jr., it’s difficult not to be skeptical about anything he says. He wants the big fights, but they’ve always seemed to slip through his fingers for some reason or another. Will that be the case with the Pacquiao-Khan fight?
“Talks are going really well,” Khan said to the timesofindia.indiatimes.com. “They [Pacquiao’s management] are speaking to my team, I have just left it to my team.”
Khan would do well not to ask for too much money for this fight, because one gets the sense that Arum will use that as an excuse to pull out of the negotiations so that he can match his fighter Crawford with Pacquiao instead.
It’s more in Arum’s favor to have his own fighter Crawford fight Pacquiao than Crawford if the money isn’t going to be that much different. You can make an argument that Khan will likely bring in more money than a Pacquiao-Crawford fight, but if Arum feels that it won’t be that much more money, then it’ll be better for him to match Pacquiao against Crawford because in the long run, it’ll help his and Top Rank’s bottom line because Crawford’s popularity will be increased by a fight against Pacquiao.
That means more money for Crawford each time he fights, as long as he keeps winning all of his fights the way he’s been doing during his caree.
“I fight anybody who is brought in front of me. If it’s Manny Pacquiao, it’s Manny Pacquiao. If not, then somebody else. We are still waiting for response on what’s going to happen” Khan said.
Khan and his management are selective in the fighters he faces. He’s not fighting “anybody who is brought in front of me,” like he says. There’s obviously a lot of decision making that goes into the selection of Khan’s fights. If it was simply the case of him being willing to fight anybody, then he’d have already fought Keith Thurman, Kell Brook and Shawn Porter. He’s not fighting those guys. He’s fighting the Chris Algieri, Luis Collazo, Devon Alexander, Carlos Molina and Julio Diaz types.
If Khan doesn’t get the fight against Pacquiao, then it stands to reason that we’ll likely see Khan continue to fight guys of that type rather than the bigger punchers.
Khan has had three years of fighting the lighter punchers mentioned above, and it’s doubtful that he’s going to change all of that right now unless he wins the lottery and is able to get the Pacquiao fight. The money would be so good for a fight against Pacquiao that it wouldn’t even matter if Khan lost the fight.
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