By Barry Holbrook: Kell Brook has officially retired at 36 on Saturday, ending his long 18-year professional career off his victory over Amir Khan last February.
Brook is walking away from three lucrative fight options he had to battle Chris Eubank Jr, Conor Benn, and Josh Taylor. He could have made a bundle fighting any one of those three, but the chances of Brook losing would have been high.
The former IBF welterweight champion Brook (40-3, 28 KOs) insists that he WON’T come back to the sport, as he no longer has it in him, and he’s made enough money to retire without the need to work.
Indeed, according to Givemesport, Brook’s net worth is $22 million, allowing him to live well without the need to return to the ring. In retiring with a huge fortune, Brook joins Tyson Fury.
Brook’s career was arguably over two years after his fourth-round knockout defeat at the hands of WBO welterweight champion Terence ‘Bud’ Crawford in November 2020.
That fight pretty much signaled the end of Brook’s career. Although Brook came back last February to destroy the shot 36-year-old Amir Khan, that fight was match-up was viewed as an old timer’s type of contest by many boxing fans involving two over-the-hill famous British fighters.
Khan hadn’t fought in three years and looked like the shell of the fighter he’d been a decade earlier. Brook says his win settled the feud with Khan, but it was arguably a hollow victory given how old, inactive, and past it Amir was.
“It’s over for me,” said Kell Brook to The Telegaph. “I’ll never box again. It’s a little emotional to be actually saying this out loud.
“It’s not there anymore,” Brook said. “I think everyone around me is pleased.
“The truth is, boxing is a very, very tough, dangerous sport, one in which you can be legally killed in the ring, and I’ve finished now with all my faculties intact.”
Brook held the IBF 147-lb title from 2014 to 2017, capturing the strap with a victory over Shawn Porter and then losing the strap against Errol Spence Jr.
Brook went wrong with his disastrous decision to go up to middleweight to challenge IBF/IBO/WBC champion Gennadiy Golovkin for his titles in September 2016 in London.
“I’ve been in the ring with Golovkin, Spence, Crawford, and I finally got my fight with Amir Khan. After that, I don’t think I needed to go on anymore. I’m one of the lucky boxers who has earned enough not to have to work,” said Brook.
While Brook was competitive against Golovkin through the first four rounds, he ultimately bowed out in the fifth due to an eye injury.
Regrettably, Brook’s career was never the same after that fight, as he once again suffered an eye injury in his next fight, a losing effort against the American phenom Spence in May 2017.
After that loss, Brook took three tune-up fights over the next two years before losing to Crawford in 2020. The ambition wasn’t there.
