By Scott Gilfoid: For all the back and forth talk that has gone on between Amir Khan (31-3, 19 KOs) and IBF welterweight champion Kell Brook (35-0, 24 KOs) over the years, you would think that Brook would want Khan to lose his fight against WBC middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (46-1-1, 32 KOs) on May 7.
Instead of wanting Khan to lose, Brook is pulling for him to beat Canelo. Of course, Brook has selfish reasons for wanting Khan to win. He wants to then face Khan and beat him later on and get the glory from being the guy that beats Khan.
Brook doesn’t say whether he would be willing to move up to the full weight for the middleweight division to face Khan for the WBC 160lb belt. We do know that Brook’s promoter Eddie Hearn is interested in matching Brook up against IBF/IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin at a catch-weight of 157lbs. Nevertheless, perhaps the catch-weight only applies to Golovkin and not to Khan.
“I don’t want him hurt. I want Khan to win. If he does, fantastic,” said Brook to theguardian.co.uk. “I’m not praying he gets splattered but when it comes to me and him, in this country, I want to destroy him. He’s got no respect for me and I’ve come up the hard way.”
I don’t think Brook is going to get the fight against Khan in 2016, and maybe not even 2017. If Brook would stop fighting fodder opponents and step it up against the top talents in the division, then maybe he could get a fight against someone like Khan.
One of the arguments that that Khan has against Brook is that he doesn’t fight anyone good, which is clearly true. If Brook would stop fighting guys like Jo Jo Dan, Kevin Bizier and Vyachaslav Sanchenko and instead fight Errol Spence Jr. and Keith Thurman, I think Khan might give him a fight. Of course, if Brook gets beaten by both of those fighters, then there’s no way Khan would fight him.
I think that would be the case. Brook is a decent top 10 fighter, but I see him as a paper champion who doesn’t rate as a real champion. I think Brook would have lost to Shawn Porter if the referee working their fight in 2014 had done his job properly in policing all the clinching that Brook did in that fight. He was clinching like a mad man in that fight, and I thought I was watching an MMA fight rather than a boxing match. Porter was boxing, but Brook was doing a tremendous amount of holding to keep Porter from throwing punches in every round.
“I want Khan but I think his demands were a way of avoiding the fight. He sees it as too much of a risk,” said Brook. “He’s gone for Canelo. Even if he loses, he can say that the weight difference was the factor, so I understand why he took the fight because there’s a big pot of money.”
Brook needs to get a clue and stop hounding Khan for the fight. There’s ways of building one’s own career, namely by fighting the best instead of the guys that Brook has been fighting. If Brook would just stop fighting all the soft jobs, he might build up enough of a name to get a fight against Khan. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening.
I see Brook continuing with his habit of fighting gawd awful opponents so that he can hold onto his IBF title for as long as possible. It’s nice to hear Brook’s promoter Eddie Hearn talk about wanting to fight talents like Gennady Golovkin, but I see that as good old fashioned name dropping on Hearn’s part. In other words, a trick to get attention on Brook the cheap and easy way by mentioning Golovkin’s name, but without any true interest of putting Brook in there with him.
If Brook ever fought someone like Golovkin, I don’t think it would go too well for Brook. I think Golovkin would slaughter him like a turkey on Thanksgiving. Golovkin has too much power, and Brook is slow and mechanical with his fighting style. I mean, Brook knows how to clinch like the best of them, but
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