By Cliff Rold
The announcement of a middleweight title fight this week between champion Saul Alvarez and former Jr. welterweight titlist Amir Khan couldn’t have come at a better time for press and social media. Boxing has very little going on at center stage right now. We’re a few weeks away from the next fight that really moves the needle.
Alvarez-Khan gave people something to talk about.
It doesn’t make it a good fight.
This is about what happens when the bigger stars don’t align for better fights to be made.
It’s not about Khan being too small, though size will be an issue. Alvarez, even at a catchweight of 155 lbs., will probably come in the ring north of the super middleweight limit. Khan’s just not going to be all that dangerous a foe for Alvarez. Khan has attributes that make him intriguing against the right opponent.
Alvarez doesn’t look like the right opponent.
Styles, and weaknesses, make a fight. Khan isn’t a fighter like Felix Trinidad or Joe Louis that seem to get knocked down often but are only really hurt occasionally. Khan is an often entertaining fighter with tremendous speed and guts who has been dropped and/or hurt badly in every division he’s fought in from 130 to 147 lbs.
It’s not because Khan has faced a bunch of killer punchers, though he oddly managed to survive hell with Marcos Maidana. Guys who aren’t much for power at all have rocked him. Willie Limond had him on the brink early in his career. Lamont Peterson had him in all sorts of trouble. He made Danny Garcia, a good but not regularly destructive puncher, look like Earnie Shavers.
Alvarez hasn’t been a one-punch knockout artist but he’s a physical, effective counter puncher who has held his own with skilled, sturdier men like Erislandy Lara and Austin Trout. Khan wouldn’t be favored over either. Reports have Team Canelo claiming they came up with this idea; went looking for this fight while they bide their time in getting to a showdown with Gennady Golovkin.
They picked Khan. In the words of Max Schmeling, anyone think they might “see something” here?
Oscar De La Hoya has been quoted comparing it to his own fight with Manny Pacquiao and there could be some comparison. Khan is technically moving up two weight classes like Pacquiao did. De La Hoya was favored, as Alvarez will be.
There’s a key difference.
The intrigue of Pacquiao-De La Hoya rested in the question of whether De La Hoya was faded enough for it to be more than the physical mismatch most presumed it would have been in Oscar’s prime. The answer was yes. He was that faded. Alvarez isn’t a 35-year old at the end of a Hall of Fame career. He’s a 25-year old in his prime who still may not have peaked.
Spare the talk about other welterweights who have risen to face the middleweight champion. There’s a meme going around with pictures of Duran, Leonard, Basilio, and Hearns as welterweights who moved on to face the middleweight kings of their time. And it’s true. Men like Roberto Duran and Sugar Ray Leonard had their chances dismissed against Marvin Hagler before Duran gave him hell and Leonard beat him.
They were living legends of the sport in their time whose accomplishments earned their place.
Unlike those men, Khan was never even a welterweight titlist much less the man in the division. He’s also never been held a title at 154 lbs. Both Leonard and Duran did before facing Hagler. Since being knocked silly by Danny Garcia at 140 lbs. in July 2014, he’s stepped into the ring only five times, once apiece in both 2013 and 2015.
In those five fights, he’s never so much as challenged for a title at 147 lbs. In those five fights, he’s faced and defeated only one consensus top ten contender in the division (Devon Alexander). He came off the floor, and was badly hurt, against faded former lightweight titlist Julio Diaz.
There was a time where Khan, despite a chin that has been less than dependable, seemed willing to take on anyone at Jr. welterweight. After Garcia, his modus operandi has been to pine for a big money mega-showdown while taking minimal risk and fighting as seldom as possible.
It worked.
Four years of relative inactivity, and one win over a top ten welterweight, will be rewarded with a shot at history’s middleweight title (even if most consider Golovkin the real champ in the division).
Good for Khan. Good for Alvarez too if he can rake in a boatload of cash after facing one of boxing’s tougher stretches from his bout with Trout to his middleweight title win over Cotto.
It still doesn’t make it a good fight.
If there is one positive, it’s that this fight will generate more buzz than some of the others names that had been bandied about for Alvarez. That’s great for the accountants.
For the viewers, it’s one more night of foregone conclusions in the first half of 2016. At light heavyweight, we still wait for Adonis Stevenson-Sergey Kovalev and hope to get Kovalev-Andre Ward. In the meantime, we got the wholly unnecessary Kovalev-Jean Pascal II. Terrence Crawford couldn’t entice Manny Pacquiao so he’s got Hank Lundy coming up. Golovkin will likely be facing highest available IBF contender Dominic Wade.
Wade is there largely by way of a win over former titlist Sam Soliman.
That’s pretty much it for Wade’s credentials.
It’s not likely to be a good fight either.
Alvarez-Golovkin still looks possible, but if it drags into 2017 it would be no surprise. The same is true for Kovalev-Ward. Pacquiao and Timothy Bradley are facing off a third time in a well-matched fight that is far from foregone. However, few seem to want to see because, well, we already saw it twice. It’s a lot of waiting for some of the sports most captivating battlers to be the sort of fights that combine spectacle and competition in the best way. When the stars don’t align, we get pairings that range from odd to ordinary to unexpected, sometimes all of the above, to keep the gears grinding.
For those who enjoy it, have fun.
For pay-per-view prices, Alvarez-Khan is buyer beware. Anyone who thinks this is a great idea going into the fight should stand by that no matter the result. Complaints after the fact would be pretty hollow.
If Alvarez-Khan isn’t your cup of tea, don’t worry about it. There are plenty of good fights coming up. Their first fight might have been ugly, but Tyson Fury-Wladimir Klitschko II has plenty of story and serious competitive questions. That heavyweight rematch fight is coming.
So are unification matches between Carl Frampton and Scott Quigg (Jr. featherweight), and Denis Lebedev and Victor Ramirez (cruiserweight), along with an intriguing welterweight clash between WBA titlist Keith Thurman and Shawn Porter. Talk of a Francisco Vargas-Orlando Salido fight is hanging out there and it would make a great co-feature with Alvarez-Khan to entice the less enthused.
Eventually, the big stars are going to align. Until then, we’ll see what other fighters, in better matched fights, can seize the opportunity to add themselves to the bigger star mix.
Cliff’s Notes…
It was refreshing to read in a piece by our Jake Donovan that both Quigg and Frampton would be open to fighting Guillermo Rigondeuax and acknowledge that, no matter who wins their fight, the number one guy in their class is the cagey Cuban. They’re right. He is. HBO’s Max Kellerman made the point in Rigondeuax’s last outing, admittedly a fight about as thrilling as stale toast, that there must be a place in the sport for finding out who the best is even if that isn’t always the most entertaining route. He’s right and let’s hope the management of the Quigg-Frampton winner agrees. Rigondeuax hasn’t been dull when he’s challenged…Supergirl and The Flash will crossover on March 28. Set the DVRs. That will be a huge week for comic geeks, coming in the same week-plus timeframe as the theatrical release of Batman vs. Superman and Daredevil Season Two on Netflix…A tweet went out earlier this week that after some initial snark and catcalls, this author wouldn’t say anything more about Alvarez-Khan until fight week. A change of mind, deleted tweet, and overall exception, was made ending at this column. As was the case with the similarly uninteresting Floyd Mayweather-Andre Berto fight, it was decided that there was no need to pile on negatively for months on end. Berto deserved better than that. So does Khan. No matter how mismatched the fight appears to be, it’s still two guys throwing leather at each other and there are plenty of other things to be positive about in this space. Might even turn out to be dead wrong and we get a classic for the ages. It wouldn’t be the first time. It’s not the most likely outcome so if one doesn’t have much nice to say…
Cliff Rold is the Managing Editor of BoxingScene, a founding member of the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board, and a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be reached at roldboxing@hotmail.com