By Steve Kim

There are various reports that WBA/WBC welterweight champion Keith Thurman (28-0, 22 KOs) will be facing Jessie Vargas in the spring.

Shawn Porter, who narrowly lost to Thurman in June of 2016, will be an interested observer should this match-up come to fruition.

His father/trainer, Kenny, told BoxingScene.com - "We'll be sitting ringside, waiting on you 'lil Kiki' to fight your mandatory, Shawn Porter. We'll be waiting on you, we'll be ringside."

Since losing to Thurman, Porter has defeated the likes of Andre Berto and Adrian Granados and is now the top rated contender in the WBC.

And Porter makes it clear that their next fight will be against Thurman (should he of course defeat Vargas). There will be no fights in the interim.

"We've done two interims," said Mr. Porter, laughing. "It's going to be Keith Thurman, we're not moving, not stepping to the side, we'll allow this situation - if that's what happens next - but we will be ringside waiting on him to accept the challenge. We're going to train, we're going to work and we're going to fight Thurman next."

But the reality is that in both 2016 and 2017 that Keith Thurman lived up to his moniker by fighting just one time in both years. But Porter states - "The reality of this situation is this: we just took fights because we couldn't get a fight with him. We just did that, we wanted to fight him and that wasn't going to happen.

There were attempts to face other well known welterweights.

"We would've definitely taken that fight with Danny Garcia but he didn't want anything to do with that either. It's so funny, as soon as Shawn takes the fight against Granados because we could not get Danny to say yes to the fight, we tried everything we could, exhausted on our end every remedy I knew, - but he didn't want that. So we went ahead and fought Granados," Kenny said.

"But how many more times are we going to take on a mandatory fight to become the number one guy to fight the guy when we already beat Berto to become the guy and then we just beat Granados to become the guy. So we can't keep doing that."

And Porter hopes that his son will be facing whoever has the WBC 147-pound title by the summer.

"That's the only thing we'll train and prepare for," he says

Oh, and he has one more message for Thurman - "We'll wait motherf***er!!'

Steve Kim is the news editor for BoxingScene.com.