By Keith Idec
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama – Virgil Hunter feels much more comfortable training Amir Khan to fight Manny Pacquiao than he did preparing him to face Canelo Alvarez.
Hunter hated the idea of Khan moving up technically two weight classes to challenge Alvarez for the WBC middleweight title from the moment the fight was made last year. Khan was well-compensated for facing Alvarez on May 7 in Las Vegas, but Hunter still feels as though there was too much working against Khan for that task to have been worth the risk.
The crushing result was what Hunter feared could happen if England’s Khan (31-4, 19 KOs) made just one tactical mistake against the hard-hitting Alvarez (48-1-1, 34 KOs), a brutal sixth-round knockout that left Khan unconscious at T-Mobile Arena.
“Amir’s got guts,” Hunter told BoxingScene.com. “The last fight, I was totally against it. I did not want him to take that fight. But he was pushed into it. That was crazy to me. It was pushed on me, so you do what you have to do.
“There was no margin for error, and no concessions made from the top or the bottom. So you just don’t have any margin for error, and you’ve gotta go into it with some margin for error. And he just didn’t have it. He followed the plan until he had a mental lapse and got caught. Simple as that.”
Khan was winning the fight on one of the three scorecards when Alvarez emphatically ended it (48-47, 47-48, 46-49). He’ll have had nearly a year off between bouts by the time he fights the 38-year-old Pacquiao (59-6-2, 38 KOs), assuming their April 23 fight unfolds as Pacquiao and Khan claimed it will through their social media accounts Saturday night.
“I recommended to him that he take at least six, eight months off to see how much he could negate the effects of the knockout,” Hunter said. “The good thing is he didn’t have a concussion. So that kind of amazed me. I thought with the way he went down, when he went to the hospital he would’ve had a concussion. But he didn’t.”
Hunter considers Khan-Pacquiao “a 50-50 fight,” but the veteran trainer couldn’t commit to how he thinks Khan will react in his first fight since suffering that devastating knockout.
“I can’t say,” Hunter said, “It would be hard to say. Time will tell that.”
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
