By William Mackay: It’s pretty much academic now that WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan (25-1, 17 KO’s) looked horrible in winning a 6th round technical decision victory over his hand-picked opponent Paul McCloskey (22-1, 12 Ko’s) last weekend. The fight, which showed Khan throwing a lot of weak flurries and missing a lot of shots and tiring out, failed to establish that Khan is a pay-per-view star with his unimpressive performance. Khan’s performance compared to Victor Ortiz, who was moving up from light welterweight to face WBC welterweight champion Andre Berto, pales in comparison the the much better performing Ortiz.
Oddly enough, Khan seems to think he performed well, saying this as quoted by Dan Rafael of ESPN: “McCloskey was unbeaten for a reason and he fought hard to stay that way, but I showed I was the better fighter. Now I’m ready for the big names and megafights. The question is, are they ready for me?”
Who is Khan kidding? His performance against McCloskey failed to show that he’s good enough or that he deserves a mega fight against the biggest stars of the sport like Floyd Mayweather Jr. Even in England, his fight wasn’t even shown on the biggest boxing television provider Sky Box Office and instead was shown on Primetime PPV. They still haven’t given the final PPV stats but reports are that it did better than the Carl Froch vs. Mikkel Kessler fight, which was only 50,000 buys.
Let’s say it was a little better than 50,000, when you compare that to Mayweather’s 1.4 million buys for his fight against Shane Mosley last year, does that tell you where Khan stands in terms of deserving a mega fight? Khan needs to prove himself still by beating a number of top fighters before he can be considered for a mega fight. I’d like to see him beat Timothy Bradley for starters without controversy, then face Zab Judah, and then a rematch with Marcos Maidana but with a different referee and then a bout against Ortiz. If Khan can win all those fights without controversy, then I’d say he deserves to be in a mega fight but not right now.
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