Kell Brook says he wants to put the memories of his last fight at the Sheffield Arena behind him when he returns to the venue – now known as the FlyDAS Arena – to face Mark DeLuca on Saturday.
This will be the ninth time that Brook, 33, has topped the bill at the arena, most recently in 2018 when he ground out a sluggish points win over Australian Michael Zerafa, which led to many believing Brook was past it.
Zerafa went on to show that performance was not so bad by stopping Jeff Horn nine months later – a defeat Horn later avenged - but the former IBF welterweight champion was starting to believe that night that he might not have a future.
“I felt deflated,” Brook said. “He was more awkward than we expected. We know he went on to beat Horn he was better than we thought and I may have underestimated him.
“If I don’t look great against DeLuca, people are going to say ‘Kell is past it’. I do believe in my heart you are going to see me perform excellently.”
But Brook has also learnt to have a different approach to his critics and lets the opinions of others wash over him.
“At beginning, I used to look at social media and it hurt me,” he said. “Now I have had so much of it, it just goes over my head. Everyone has their own opinion, why am I worried about that?
“When I was world champion, I had all these friends and hangers-on. Now I could count my friends on one hand. As you get older, you realise more who the people are who matter.”
Brook believes he is a changed person, however, being spurred into good habits by the knowledge that if things don’t go right this time, there probably won’t be another chance.
“My thinking is completely different to before,” he said. “Something has clicked, people might be thinking ‘he is saying this again’. Maybe it’s the age thing. Even whether it’s cutting corners here and there, even though I have said I’ve not, I have.
“I’m realising now that this small window is getting very small. When I walk away from the game I want to be able to hold my head high and say if I get beat, I get beat. I gave it my all.”
Brook, 33, last made the welterweight limit when he lost the IBF title to Errol Spence in the summer of 2017, a night he says he was badly affected by the effort to shed the extra muscle he had put on to face Gennady Golovkin at middleweight the previous year. He says he would make 147lb again for the right fight, whether it be Spence again, Terence Crawford, Mikey Garcia or Manny Pacquiao. Of the four, he rates Crawford as the best.
“Crawford hasn’t got many flaws, he is an excellent fighter,” Brook said. “But when I leave the sport, I want to have given it everything and if that means losing to the better man at least I will have been happy that I have given it my best.
“When I fought Errol Spence, we had all heard about him beating up Mayweather in sparring, but for six or seven rounds I was beating him and I was probably at 50 per cent. I’m very hard to beat.”