Amir Khan provided Terence Crawford with the royal treatment when his former rival arrived Monday in Manchester, England.
A conquest Crawford beat by technical knockout sent a Rolls Royce to pick up the unbeaten WBO welterweight champion at the airport. Crawford has been put up at the same hotel where Khan has stayed all week as well.
A thankful Khan considered it the least he could do for everything Crawford has done for him over the past six months. Their unforeseen alliance – first in Crawford’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, and later in Colorado Springs, where Crawford trains – has “motivated” and “inspired” Khan throughout his preparation for a long-awaited domestic grudge match with Kell Brook on Saturday night at AO Arena in Manchester.
Three years ago, Khan was training to try to dethrone Crawford in an ESPN Pay-Per-View main event at Madison Square Garden. The irony of Crawford becoming one of his greatest assets while getting ready to face another British welterweight Crawford stopped isn’t lost on Khan.
They came together thanks to Khan’s wife, Faryal Makhdoom, who, unbeknownst to Khan, contacted Brian McIntyre, Crawford’s head trainer, last summer about working with her husband. Khan admits that isn’t something he would’ve welcomed had his wife brought it up to him without having directly contacted McIntyre.
Based on how hard Khan prepared to box Brook, however, Khan couldn’t be more appreciative of the initiative his wife showed.
“It’s probably the best experience I’ve had,” Khan told BoxingScene.com in reference to training with Crawford’s team. “Because you have to understand that, you know, obviously he beat me in the fight and I wanted to see how I’ve come on as well, with the weeks of training I’ve done with Bo-Mac, how much of a better fighter am I now. And this was halfway through the training camp. It felt really good when Crawford himself comes to his trainer and says, ‘Amir looks really good.’ Bo-Mac came and said, ‘Hey, Terence was saying you look really good in sparring. And also, you looked really good on the mitts.’
“He used to come down to the gym and watch me train on the mitts and stuff. And just having him there was such massive inspiration, because obviously, he would stop and say, ‘Amir, try this and try that.’ He got in the ring with me a couple of times with the pads, to work me. And, I mean, for a pound-for-pound champ, who’s a champ himself, fighters don’t ordinarily go into the ring. I’ve trained before with guys like Andre Ward and Manny Pacquiao. They’ve never done that. But that’s what Crawford did by getting in the ring himself, because he wants me to win.”
The 35-year-old Khan especially respects that Crawford cared enough to be hard on him while Khan trained.
They sparred against each other on a couple of occasions the first time Khan visited Omaha in September, when McIntyre and Jacqui “Red” Spikes, Crawford’s other trainer, gave Khan what amounted to a tryout. Crawford was preparing for his own showdown with Shawn Porter at that point, a fight Crawford won by 10th-round technical knockout November 20 at Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino’s Michelob ULTRA Arena in Las Vegas.
When Khan returned to Omaha for his training camp in December, Crawford came to the gym sometimes to help him. The three-division champion, who stopped Khan in the sixth round of their fight in April 2019, later flew to Colorado Springs to assist in his preparation to battle Brook.
Crawford’s no-nonsense approach brought Khan back to when he was a young, hungry fighter hopeful of winning a world title.
“Normally, when you walk into a gym, you’re one of the biggest names there,” Khan said. “Obviously, I was still one of the biggest names in Crawford’s gym, but still being told what to do by a fellow fighter. I didn’t take that in any bad way. I took that as an inspiration, really, because I was like, ‘Wow! This is the way it should be. I’m glad he is talking to me like this, telling me what to do, because he wants me to win and he wants the best out of me.’
“Otherwise, he wouldn’t have bothered. He would be like, ‘Oh, yeah,’ and laughed and joked with me. But he was quite good. And same with the team, Bo-Mac and everyone. Like when we were sparring, like they would tell me off. Being a two-time world champion, they didn’t care about that. They were telling me off. ‘Look, you need to do this and do that.’ And I like that, because it brings you back to like the old days, back when I wanted to become a world champion.”
Khan also was glad he got to know Crawford on a personal level. While it was strictly business in the gym, where Khan considers Crawford “a shrewd operator,” Crawford wasn’t the least bit “cold,” as Khan anticipated even after McIntyre and Spikes agreed to train him.
Their families even went out to dinner in Omaha the first time Khan went there in August.
“He was laughing and joking, and we took a nice picture,” Khan said. “And it was cool. Obviously, when he’s away from boxing, he’s a very chilled-out, normal person. But as you know him, when it’s work time, he’s very serious. Because even at times when I was in the gym, he was like, ‘You’re not finished yet.’ And I was like, ‘I’m sure I’m done.’ And he was like, ‘Nah, you’re not finished yet. You’ve gotta get on that machine and start doing some sit-ups, do some push-ups and do some chin-ups. And was like, ‘What?’
“He’s like, ‘Go and do it now.’ When someone tells you off like that, you’re gonna do it, especially when it comes from someone like him. Because at the end of the day, you respect him and what he’s done in the sport of boxing, not many people can even dream on. So, I thought, ‘I better listen to that.’ ”
Crawford will sit ringside to watch Khan (34-5, 21 KOs) battle Brook (37-3, 23 KOs), whom Crawford beat by fourth-round technical knockout in November 2020 at MGM Grand Conference Center in Las Vegas. Their 12-round, 149-pound bout will be the main event of a Sky Sports Box Office pay-per-view show in the United Kingdom and Ireland (£19.95; 6 p.m. GMT) and an ESPN+ stream in the United States (1 p.m. ET; 10 a.m. PT).
“I’m definitely happy,” said Khan, who previously was trained by Virgil Hunter, Ward’s career-long chief second. “I’m very lucky to be in the position where [my wife] was caring about me. She wanted me to get back to my winning ways. She knows how much boxing means to me. And she was like, ‘Look, I’m gonna help you get back to that position, back to the top again.’ And especially for this fight against Kell Brook, I mean, even though there’s not a title on the line, it’s as big as a world title fight for me because it’s a massive fight between myself and him.”
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.