By William Mackay: Well, it looks as if Golden Boy Promotions didn’t have much choice in the matter whether to match their young possible star World Boxing Association (WBA) light welterweight champion Amir Khan (23-1, 17 KO’s) up with WBA light welterweight interim champion Marcos Maidana (29-1, 27 KO’s, because if Golden Boy didn’t put Khan in with Maidana, HBO wasn’t going to be televising anymore of Khan’s fights. In an interview by Dan Rafael of ESPN with HBO’s Sports president Ross Greenburg, Greenburg said this to Golden Boy Promotions: “You have to deliver Khan-Maidana or we’re not interested in another Khan fight.”

Wow! So that’s why Khan finally was matched against the hard hitting Maidana? I always thought it was because the WBA had threatened to strip Khan of his title if he didn’t finally face Maidana and get it over with. Maidana had only been waiting for an entire year, being told that they were building the fight up and that Maidana still wasn’t a big enough name to fight Khan yet, even though Khan was completely unknown in the United States at the time and is barely known now. Khan will be facing Maidana on December 11th at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The Khan vs. Maidana bout will be shown on HBO, because this is the fight that they, along with most boxing fans, have been interested in for a long time now. It’s nice that khan has finally agreed to take the bout, because the division isn’t big enough for the both of them. One of them is going to get picked off in this fight and relocated to mere contender and/or gate keeper status.

My guess is that it will be Khan that gets knocked cold and pushed down into the hungry pack of contenders, where hopefully he’ll take on some of the top fighters and work his way into a shot a the title next time instead of having it handed to him without having to beat any of the top 15 contenders. When Khan fought for the WBA light welterweight title last year against then champion Andriy Kotelnik, Khan had never fought at light welterweight, and had instead fought his entire career at lightweight. Khan was allowed to skip over the top 15 in the WBA and fight for the title against Kotelnik, which I don’t think was hardly fair for the contenders that got skipped over.