By Edward Chaykovsky
Former champion Antonio Tarver was working behind the broadcast booth and called the action two weeks ago on Spike TV, as Amir Khan battled Chris Algieri in the Premier Boxing Champions main event from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.
The fight with Algieri, who was coming off one-sided drubbing at the hands of Manny Pacquiao, was viewed as an audition for the British star to solidify his worth for a fight with WBC/WBO/WBA welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. in the fall.
Algieri was a big underdog, but he pulled off a very respectable performance by often getting off with his big right hand and making Khan struggle in several rounds.
After the way Khan looked, Tarver is not sure how well a Mayweather fight would perform on pay-per-view.
"I don’t know how an Amir Khan vs. Floyd Mayweather fight will sell right now, I don’t know if it will be anticlimactic coming off of the Manny Pacquiao circus of media. When you look at it from a media standpoint, it doesn’t get bigger than that. Anything that Mayweather does will probably fall short of that, but you really never know what Mayweather is feeling or what he’s thinking. He probably wants to do the biggest thing out there," Tarver told On The Ropes Boxing Radio.
"I thought Amir needed an exceptional performance because he put himself under that light by saying, 'I want you to draw comparisons between me and Manny Pacquiao going in here fighting Chris Algieri.' He put himself under that scope. Did he beat Algieri more convincingly than Manny Pacquiao? Of course not, nowhere close."