By Scott Gilfoid: British boxing writer Steve Bunce thinks Amir Khan was done wrong by Floyd Mayweather Jr. by him choosing to twist Khan around recently by giving him hope for a fight with him on May 3rd, but then pulling the rug out from under him and selecting WBA welterweight champion Marcos Maidana as his next opponent instead. Bunce doesn’t have a problem with Mayweather’s choice of Maidana. Instead, Bunce’s issue is with how Khan was strung along.
“What’s bad about it is the way it’s been done,” Bunce said to Talksport. “I’ve got no problem with the final decision, the problem is that it was all done in the open. It was very shabby…Let’s not mince our words, Amir has been conned here. He’s been played. It’s really hurt him. It would have been life-changing money for Amir Khan. He could have ended up leaving Las Vegas with as much as $14 million in his back pocket.”
I highly doubt Khan would have ended up with $14 million for the fight with Mayweather, but I could see him getting at least $6-8 million for the fight, and that would definitely be a good cash out fight for Khan. His career could go belly up after the Mayweather fight, and he’d still have that cash to live off of for the rest of his life unless he lost it gambling, bad business decisions or through divorce.
Bunce went on to point out that Khan had agreed to a contract to fight Mayweather last October, and that because of his belief that he was going to get that fight, Khan chose not to face IBF welterweight champion Devon Alexander last December. Mayweather’s team has denied giving Khan a contract, so it’s anyone’s guess whether Khan was given a contract or not to sign. But even if he did, he should have kept busy and taken the fight against Alexander. Nothing is certain when you have fight negotiations with Mayweather, and Khan should have known that.
Where Khan ended up looking bad was how he took Mayweather literally for what he said about having the fans using a poll on his website to select his next opponent. Mayweather would never use something like that to select his next opponent, and Khan seemed to believe what Mayweather was saying because he encouraged his twitter followers to vote him into the fight. If it was me, I would have ignored what Mayweather said and realized that he would never pick out an opponent based on a poll. I wouldn’t have lowered myself to take part in the poll, because I wouldn’t have wanted to look like sap if Mayweather ignored the poll results. Poor Khan. He should have known better.
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