By Tim Fletcher: Amir “King” Khan surprised fans this week when he revealed that he wanted a mega-fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. so badly that he would have taken the fight for free if the superstar had given him the green light.
Khan, 29, just wanted the opportunity to display his boxing skills against Mayweather so that he could have proven finally that he was the better fighter. Whether a fight like that could ever have taken place under those conditions is extremely doubtful.
You hear fighters say all the time that they would fight for free against a certain fighter, but I don’t think the networks, sanctioning bodies and the state commissions would give the green light to a Mayweather-Khan fight if only Mayweather was going to get paid.
If Khan really were serious about being interested in facing Mayweather without pay, it would have made for an interesting bout. Mayweather would have made a bundle off the fight, and the attention would have been huge. Khan would have helped his career out due to the attention he would have received in fighting Mayweather.
Khan probably would have made money on endorsement deals before the fight, so it is not as if he would get nothing for the fight.
“We thought we got very close to making that fight happen,” Khan said to TMZ.com. “Floyd, to be honest, is too scared to fight me. I did everything to make that fight happen. I spoke to my team, and I even said ‘I’ll fight you for free,’ just to show the world that I’m a better fighter than him, but he just didn’t want to fight me and wanted the easy way out.”
Mayweather ignored Khan in the last two years of his career, and instead fought Marcos Maidana twice, Manny Pacquiao and Andre Berto. There is nothing wrong with fighting Pacquiao, but Mayweather arguably lost money by choosing to fight Berto and Maidana rather than Khan. Never the less, with the guaranteed money that Mayweather was getting for each fight with his Showtime/CBS contract, he could afford to lose money fighting less popular fighters like Berto and Maidana rather than Khan.
Khan’s rejection by Mayweather and Pacquiao may have been the factor that caused him to agree to a fight against the heavier WBC middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez. Khan will be fighting Canelo at a catch-weight of 155lbs on May 7 at the T-Mobile Center in Los Vegas, Nevada.
After failing to get Mayweather and the Pacquiao fights, Khan agreed to fight Canelo in a fight that Khan has very little chance of winning. It’s a fight with very little risk for Canelo because he gets to fight a lighter guy than himself, who doesn’t have the kind of punching power that can give him problems.
“No one in my division wanted to fight me,” Khan said. “Mayweather let me down. Pacquiao let me down. Danny Garcia let me down. So I’m in a position where people don’t want to fight me, so I have to move up…I want the biggest fights.”
It is too for Khan that he could not have gotten the fights against Mayweather and Pacquiao. If he had, I doubt that he would have ever agreed to fight a guy as big as Canelo.
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