By Scott Gilfoid: The Mayweather poll ended as of last Sunday with Amir Khan trouncing Marcos Maidana by a 57 to 43 percent of the votes. Khan ended up with 20,105 votes to Maidana’s 15,474 votes. With Khan’s victory, we’re just waiting for the big announcement from Floyd Mayweather Jr. that he’ll be fighting Khan next on May 3rd at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Mayweather had the poll set up to pick his next opponent between Khan and Maidana. While Maidana destroyed Khan in the independent polls at Fightnews and ESPN, Khan had his way with Maidana on the poll that counted at the Mayweather Promotions site.
It’s not that Khan was ahead the whole way. He was definitely trailing after the first two days, but once Khan encouraged his 1.4 million twitter followers from around the world to start voting for him, it was basically all over from that point because they quickly stormed the Mayweather website and voted for Khan by the thousands. Maidana, with only 35,000 twitter followers, was no match to keep up with Khan. It’s unclear whether there was any advertising by either fighters in their home countries or in places like India or Pakistan.
There’s a positive and a negative of Khan getting the Mayweather fight. The good thing about it is the fight will be exciting for as long as it lasts due to Khan’s habit of running forward and throwing wild flurries without much accuracy involved. The bad thing about is is that Mayweather is likely going to time Khan during one of his flurries and knock him out much in the same way that Breidis Prescott and Danny Garcia did by nailing him with a left hook that he doesn’t see. Khan has no defense against left hooks, especially when he’s in the midst of throwing one of his flurries. Khan’s trainer Virgil Hunter might be wise to tell Khan to throw only one punch at a time to avoid getting countered, but old habits die hard. I expect Khan to storm Mayweather after 1 or 2 disciplined rounds, and end up getting caught with a big shots to the head and knocked out. Yeah, there will be a lot of people that will be saying ‘I told you so,’ and I’ll be one of them.
It’s just too bad that Mayweather couldn’t have selected someone else, and let Khan fight his way into the fight with him the old fashioned way by beating some quality opponents to get the fight. I’m sorry, I don’t see Carlos Molina [the lightweight Carlos, not the junior middleweight Carlos] and Julio Diaz as worthy opponents that would get Khan the fight with Mayweather. Before those two fights, Khan was beaten in back to back fights by Lamont Peterson and Danny Garcia. So what we have here is a fighter with a 2-2 record in his last 4 fights getting a fight with Mayweahter because his millions of fans from around the world voted him in rather than from him earning the fight on merit.
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