By William Mackay: Recently, promoter Gary Shaw brought up the idea of a light welterweight tournament matching the best fighters in the division such as Amir Khan, Timothy Bradley, Devon Alexander and Marcos Maidana. It sounds like a win-win situation for all the fighters involved, right? Well, there’s one problem with that. Khan, the WBA light welterweight champion, reportedly doesn’t want to fight in the tournament and is looking to fight the winner of the Juan Manuel Marquez vs. Juan Diaz fight on July 31st.
That seems like an interesting idea if Khan was a lightweight, but he’s not. Khan left the lightweight division a year ago and won a title against Andriy Kotelnik at light welterweight. So why then is Khan going after lightweights rather than light welterweights? I have no idea. It isn’t just the winner of the Diaz-Marquez fight. Lightweights Michael Katsidis, John Murray and Joel Casamayor were all being considered as potential opponents for Khan to fight on July 31st.
Khan won’t be fighting on that date because supposedly it would conflict with the soccer world cup competition and that might hurt Khan’s pay-per-view sales for a fight. However, Katsidis and Murray were quickly ruled out as opponents for Khan because they wanted too much money. In that case, Khan was going to be fighting 38-year-old Casamayor, and that’s an opponent that Khan might not have been able to bring in the big PPV numbers against because he would likely have little chance of beating Khan.
If Khan does face the winner of the Diaz-Marquez fight, then why doesn’t Khan take part in the light welterweight tourney after that fight? That sounds like a reasonable thing to do, because Khan has been saying he wants to clean up the light welterweight division and unify all the titles before moving up to the welterweight division and fighting a mega fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr.
Khan wants this to happen really soon. What I don’t understand is how Khan is going to beat all the top fighters in the junior welterweight division – Maidana, Alexander and Bradley – if he’s fighting lightweights. That doesn’t seem to be a logical move on Khan’s part. I can understand it as a way of making money without the same risk involved with fighting the bigger light welterweights, but I don’t see how Khan is getting any closer to unifying or cleaning up the light welterweight division by fighting lightweights.
I think Khan would be much off fighting light welterweights rather than going after lightweights. And we’re not even sure that Marquez will fight Khan. He could wait until around for nothing and still not get the Marquez fight. And I don’t see how appealing a fight between Khan and Diaz would be, since Diaz has lost two out of his last four fights. And some would say that Diaz has lost three out of his last four fights because his win over Paulie Malignaggi in their first fight was highly questionable.
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