By Victor Salazar
Brooklyn, New York - It’s hard to argue that there is a better father-son combo in boxing than Shawn Porter and Kenny Porter. Shawn suffered the first loss of his career at the hands of UK’s Kell Brook last August.
Ken Porter let his son get over the loss in his own way and it was back to work. Though the trainer says there wasn’t much to talk about after the first loss because he felt strongly that his son won the fight.
“I still don’t think we lost especially when he (Brook) held my guy 87 times in the first 7 rounds,” Ken Porter told BoxingScene.com. “So at the same time I can’t jump on him for not being able to do things he was doing because the fouls weren’t reprimanded by the referee. Now what are we doing? We find ourselves preparing for holds and clinches.”
Porter feels his son is too professional to retaliate so now in camp they are training for ways to avoid illegal activity in the ring
“Shawn’s just too professional,” the trainer said. “Broner thumbed him, hit him in the back of the head. What I need in that particular scenario is letting the guy know that you can’t be able to injure me. We can’t allow that to happen. We got to figure out how to stop guys from doing that. We have to prepare for fighters styles and also prepare on how to avoid illegal tactics in the ring.”
A case could be made that out of all the welterweights not named Mayweather or Pacquiao, Porter’s win over Adrien Broner is as good a win as any versus his peers at 147. For that reason, Ken Porter says Shawn’s name hasn’t been mentioned with Floyd Mayweather.
“That would be the particular reason why. His (Mayweather) answer was 'no' when they mention Shawn because he don’t want it. He (Mayweather) didn’t say he’s not a pay-per-view fighter, or his skill level isn’t there. In fact, he threw us off to someone else. But we have no issue fighting a Keith Thurman especially if you tell me we are in the running for something real big this year like a Mayweather fight. If it’s not Thurman, a rematch with Adrien (Broner), Marcos Maidana, Amir Khan, or Danny Garcia. Those are all names. We don’t need a belt. We just need to fight that guys that come with the name.”