Kell Brook: I punch as hard as Canelo

By Boxing News - 05/09/2016 - Comments

brook455By Scott Gilfoid: IBF welterweight champion Kell Brook (36-0, 25 KOs) has changed his mind about wanting to defend his IBF title against Amir Khan after seeing how badly he was knocked out by WBC middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez last Saturday night.

Brook thinks it would be a bad idea for him to fight Khan now because he believes he can punch as hard as Canelo and he’d knock Khan out too. Brook wants to see Khan come back from this loss, because he thinks it was a bad one for him.

Khan hasn’t said anything about wanting to fight Brook, so there’s no worry of Brook having to tell Khan to get lost if/when he comes looking to get a fight against him.

It’s always been the other way around with Brook hounding Khan for a fight, and I suspect it’ll continue to be like that in the future despite Brook saying he’s not interested in fighting him right now.

“He got knocked out in a really bad way. I punch just as hard as Canelo. It would just be a matter of time before the same thing happened,” said Brook o skysports.com. “[It] would not be safe” for Khan.

So you punch as hard as Canelo, eh, Brook? Your bragging skills are also top notch as well.

Well, if Brook really can punch as hard as Canelo, then I suppose it’s time for Brook to move up in weight to the middleweight division so he can hound Canelo for a fight, or better yet go after the best fighter in the 160lb division in Gennady Golovkin. I mean, if Brook can really punch as hard as Canelo, then what in the heck is he doing fighting at welterweight against the likes of Kevin Bizier, Jo Jo Dan, Frankie Gavin, Matthew Hatton, Vyacheslav Senchenko and Carson Jones?

Brook has eaten through 12 years of his career fighting guys like that and not getting the big money that fighters like Canelo is getting. If Brook can punch as hard as Canelo, then he most certainly needs to move up to Canelo’s self-created weight division at 155lbs and compete with him.

Even if Canelo ignores Brook completely as Khan has done all these years, Brook can then use his popularity to get fighters to either come down from middleweight to 155 or get welterweights to fight him at that weight like Canelo is doing.

“After the defeat this weekend, it won’t be safe for him to fight me. He’s had some bad knockouts,” said Brook. “I’m not sure what Canelo weighed on the night but it was a lot bigger than Amir. Losing in the way he did, with a devastating knockout, was nothing good for him. He’s had a few now and it’s going to take it out of anyone.”

It’s pretty clear that Khan has been knocked out badly in three of his fights during his career, and I’m not sure if he ever fully recovered from his first knockout loss to Breidis Prescott eight years ago. That was really bad one. Khan blamed it on him being drained in having to make weight for the lightweight division. But when Khan moved up to light welterweight and was subsequently knocked out by Danny Garcia, we had a similar tune being whistled.

Now that Khan has bulked up to middleweight and bbeen knocked out by Canelo, Khan needs to face the facts about his chin. He’s not getting knocked out due to the weights he’s been fighting at. He’s being knocked out because he can’t take a good punch. When we saw Julio Diaz drop Khan in their fight in 2013, it was clear then that Khan’s chin just isn’t ever going to be strong enough to deal with him being nailed hard.

It’s a credit to Khan that he’s been able to win as many fights as he has because he could have been knocked out by some of the guys he’s beaten if he’d been hit often enough. Khan’s fight against Marcos Maidana in 2010 was one where Khan just barely made it through without him getting knocked out. If the referee hadn’t been so involved in the last two rounds of that fight by getting in the way of Maidana while he was trying to finish Khan off, I think we would have seen Khan get knocked out.

“I’m looking at Danny Garcia, Jessie Vargas. Shawn Porter and Keith Thurman are fighting each other. I want an exciting fight. That’s what we’re looking at,” said Brook.

Honestly, I’ll be surprised if Brook even gets the Vargas fight, because none of those guys have been mentioning his name recently. I think Shawn Porter might opt to fight Brook in a rematch if the money is right, but I’m not sure if he would be too excited about having to deal with Brook’s nonstop clinching a second time. That was one of the worst fights I’ve seen since watching the Lennox Lewis vs. Henry Akinwande fight. Brook was taking clinching to a whole new level and getting away with it due to the referee working the fight having a Laissez-faire approach to dealing with clinching.