By Scott Gilfoid: Amir Khan (30-3, 19 KOs) says he should find out within the next two weeks whether he’ll be getting a fight against WBA/WBC 147 pound champion Floyd Mayweather Jr or not for the first part of 2015.
It looks like Khan figures that Mayweather will make up his mind about who his next opponent will be by then, as he’ll have a pretty good idea if he’ll be getting the Manny Pacquiao fight soon.
It’s interesting that Khan still hasn’t given up on the idea of facing Mayweather even though it seems pretty clear that Mayweather isn’t interested in facing him due to his lack of name recognition among casual boxing fans in the U.S. Mayweather said in an interview this month that Khan isn’t a big enough name for him to fight.
“I should find out in the next couple of weeks what’s going to happen,” Khan said via Skysports.com about him getting a fight against Mayweather. “Hopefully, I can get one of them [Mayweather or Pacquiao]. I don’t know how long they’ll be around.”
Mayweather is probably looking at fighting three more times before he wraps up his career. If his idea is to make the most money possible in each of his last three fights, then it makes absolutely no sense for him to fight Khan with one of those fights, because a fight against him would likely do no better than Mayweather’s fights against Marcos Maidana. We’re talking about a fight that would be lucky if it generated much more than 800,000 pay-per-view buys.
Mayweather could make far more money facing the likes of Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, Pacquiao and Miguel Cotto. Mayweather would be better off finishing his career facing those three guys rather than inserting Khan into the equation and seeing his pay-per-view buys fail to reach 1 million buys. Mayweather can hit over 1 million buys against all three of those big names, but definitely not against Khan.
Heck, Mayweather would be no better off fighting Khan than he would someone like Devon Alexander. Khan’s problem is he doesn’t have the fan base in the United States for a fight between him and Mayweather to be worthwhile for the super star. Khan is a big star in Pakistan, India and the UK, but that’s not where the pay-per-view guys are going to be coming from.
Mayweather needs a star in the U.S for him to bring in big pay-per-view buys, and Khan simply hasn’t done his job to build himself as a star in the U.S. He made good progress when he first started fighting in the U.S, but then he had a close decision over Marcos Maidana that really begged for a rematch, and then there was Khan’s losses to Lamont Peterson and Danny Garcia.
Really, Khan needed to go back and fight all three of those guys and prove that he can beat them in order to win over the U.S boxing fans, and unfortunately Khan failed to do that.
Instead of rematches against Maidana, Peterson and Garcia, we saw Khan fight little Carlos Molina, Julio Diaz, Luis Collazo and Devon Alexander. None of them are big punchers, and none of them were champions. As such, Khan shortchanged himself by fighting them, and as a result of that, you can argue that Khan’s popularity was hurt.
Khan says that Kell Brook could be an option for him as well, saying “That could be an option as well.”
That’s a fight that Khan badly needs to take if he wants to start building up his star power. He needs to beat Brook, and then beat Maidana, Peterson and Danny Garcia. If Khan can beat all four of those fighters, which I highly doubt, then I think he’d be a much bigger name in the U.S and ready for a fight against Mayweather.
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