By Scott Gilfoid: Kell Brook is kind of bent out of shape because Amir Khan has let Errol Spence Jr. use his boxing gym in the UK in getting ready for his fight with Brook on May 27 at Bramall Lane in Sheffield, England. Brook (36-1, 25 KOs) thinks that Khan wants Spence to beat him for some reason.
Just why Brook would believe that is the big question. It seems like it would be the opposite. Khan would be much better off if Brook beats Spence, because he can make a lot of money fighting Brook if he continues to be the IBF welterweight champion. A loss for Brook against Spence would hurt the interest in a Khan-Brook fight.
(Photo credit: Lawrence Lustig/Matchroom Sport)
Spence, 27, came over to England 2 weeks early so that he can get acclimatized to the weather, and avoid being jet-lagged from the long flight from the U.S. Khan was good enough to let Spence use his gym in Lancashire to train for the last 2 weeks of the fight. It was pretty nice of Khan to do that.
“That’s Amir Khan through and through,” said Brook. “He would love to see me lose this fight so he doesn’t have to fight me but that’s not going to happen. He can lend Errol his gym but he can’t save him on May 27 and the only thing on my mind is the fight.”
It sounds to be like Brook is worried. When you hear a fighter bellyaching about his opponent working out in a gym in your own country, it tells me that the fighter is sweating bullets about the fight. What does Brook expect Spence to do? Did he want him to not have any access to a gym at all in the last 2 weeks before the fight? I don’t think it would really matter though. Spence is so talented and so highly skilled that he would likely still end up whipping Brook royally even if he didn’t have a gym to work out in the final 2 weeks before the fight.
There are some fans that are wondering if Brook will give Spence credit for beating him on May 27. The fans remembered the excuses Brook came up with after his recent loss to Gennady “GGG” Golovkin last September in London, England. Brook tried his best in that fight but it wasn’t good enough. Golovkin ended up battering him until he quit fighting back in the 5th. At that point Brook’s corner had to throw in the towel after seeing his fighter was in distress. Brook had stopped throwing shots, which is usually a sign that a fighter has mentally quit and needs saving.
It was thought that Brook would shower praise over the head of Golovkin after the fight. We didn’t see that though. Brook reacted to the loss in the opposite way by blaming it on him suffering an eye injury, and saying that the outcome would have been different if not for the injury. Brook even went so far as to say that he had lifted Golovkin off his feet with a punch.
It was bad to hear the excuses from Brook, because he wasn’t taking the high ground to stand tall in defeat like a loser should be giving his opponent lots of credit. The excuses made Brook sound like a sour loser. That’s why I’m really hoping that I don’t hear excuses from Brook if loses to Spence on May 27. With the way that Brook is bellyaching about Spence using Khan’s gym, I have the feeling that we’re going to see Brook in fine form when it comes to rattling off excuses after he gets beaten by Spence.
Here are the predictable excuses that I can see Brook coming up with after Spence smashes him:
– ‘My right eye was acting up on me. I would have won if not for my eye. ‘
– ‘I was weight drained from melting down to 147. It was too hard to go from middleweight to welterweight. I’m really a junior middleweight at this point. My body is too big to fight at welterweight.’
– ‘The judges robbed me.’
– ‘I over-trained for the fight.’
– ‘I didn’t eat enough food. I was weak.’
Brook says he wants to give the boxing fans what they want. It’s too bad that Brook didn’t fight Spence earlier because the American fighter was primed to fight Brook ages ago. Brook chose to defend his IBF title 3 times against these fighters instead of facing Spence: Jo Jo Dan, Frankie Gavin and Kevin Bizier.
“The fans know what I’m about. I’ve gone from moving up to middleweight to fight Gennady Golovkin to coming back down to face one of the most dangerous welterweights out there,” said Brook. ”All I want to do is give the fans what they want – that’s what they deserve.”
It’s interesting that Brook is mentioning how he’s coming down from middleweight for the Spence fight, because that sounds to me like the beginning stages of an excuse for Brook. I hate to hear excuses, but it sure sounds to me like Brook is already priming the boxing fans in getting ready to spring an excuse for when things don’t work out for him. It wouldn’t be so bad for Brook to constantly talk up his fight with Golovkin if he had actually won it or if he had gone the distance. That didn’t happen though.
Brook fell apart after suffering an eye injury. For that reason, it would be better if Brook didn’t talk about the Golovkin fight at all, because it was a negative rather than a positive. Golovkin won in a blowout victory. It only had one competitive round and that was the 2nd. The rest of the fight was one that involved Brook running from Golovkin and taking shots as he ran. There was no positive in the way that Brook fight. To be sure, one of the three judges that worked the Golovkin-Brook fight had it scored 3 rounds to 1 in favor of Brook, but that was an atrocious score in my opinion. The other 2 judges had the score knotted at 2 rounds a piece between Golovkin and Brook. That scoring just showed you what Golovkin was up against on the night in fighting Brook in the UK rather than in a neutral venue. Golovkin ultimately brought his own judges with him in the form of his two fists, and he never let the official judges have a say so. They might as well given have used their scorecards to make paper airplanes out of them, but they didn’t play into the final outcome of the fight. Golovkin made sure of that.