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Whether the wait is ever really worth it is up for debate.
It doesn’t mean waiting is an absolute end of the world.
This weekend, we will get the long desired UK showdown between former Jr. welterweight titlist and Olympic silver medalist Amir Khan (34-5, 21 KO) and former welterweight titlist Kell Brook (39-3, 27 KO). It was always one of those fights that made too much sense not to happen eventually.
2022 is later than what seemed sensible when Brook reigned as IBF welterweight champion in 2014 and Khan was outdueling Luis Collazo and Devon Alexander to establish himself as a welterweight contender. Both men are now 35, coming off an inactive 2021. Brook’s last start was a knockout loss to Terence Crawford. Khan rebounded from a 2019 stoppage loss to Crawford with a knockout of Billy Dib later that year and has been out of the game since.
The fans who show up for a good time this Saturday at the Manchester Arena (ESPN+, 1:00 PM EST) will forget about the wait as soon as the bell sounds. Time is like that.
It passes slowly until we get where we’re going and then it’s just another memory as impossible to get back to as the day we were born.
If the fight sucks, the wait will matter again. If it’s a wild success, what unfolded in the ring today will matter more than what might have been previously. With a fight like Brook-Khan, the unavoidable question is whether later is better than never.
Boxing history is a mixed bag when it comes to finding an answer.
There are mega-fight examples where later was definitely better than never. The story of the sport wouldn’t be the same without having seen Sugar Ray Leonard-Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Evander Holyfield-Mike Tyson, and Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao. The last of those didn’t get critical raves at the time but Pacquiao’s success after the fight should recast the quality of what occurred in the ring that night.
Brook-Khan, even had it happened in 2015, wouldn’t have resonated globally like those but it would have been then, as it is now, a major attraction. We got an example just last year of a fight that took years to materialize and then delivered even more than could have been hoped for.
In 2012, without the world knowing it, boxing fans were treated to a clash between two of the best flyweight-ish battlers of the last thirty years or more. Roman Gonzalez defeated Juan Francisco Estrada that night in a fiery Jr. flyweight affair. When Estrada immediately moved up and won a pair of belts at flyweight, and then Gonzalez moved up to win a belt in the class, it felt like the clock was ticking.
It kept ticking.
Gonzalez moved up another weight class, won and lost a title, suffered what looked like a career altering knockout, took some time off to heal from injuries, and then worked back into the title picture. Estrada racked up title defenses at flyweight and then won a title at Jr. bantamweight in his second try. A rematch that made sense years before made sense again.
They delivered one of the best fights in Jr. bantamweight history and one of the best of 2021. The wait was worth it.
Another long delayed rematch was not.
In 1993, Roy Jones won the vacant IBF middleweight belt against a then-largely unknown battler by the name of Bernard Hopkins. It wasn’t a particularly memorable fight and wasn’t one anyone wanted to see again for a long time.
That started to change around 2000. Hopkins was years into his reign at middleweight and Jones had beaten everyone of note not named Dariusz at light heavyweight. There was chatter about a rematch that got louder in 2001 after Hopkins knocked out Felix Trinidad to unify at middleweight. Fans got a memorable interview. 60-40 I’ll…
Yeah, no fight.
No, the rematch wouldn’t develop until 2010. Seventeen years after their first fight, Jones and Hopkins locked horns again. No one really cared anymore by then. Hopkins won. Jones, coming off a first round knockout loss to Danny Green, was less than a shell of his best. It was not good and was a box office dud.
Never would have been better.
Khan-Brook isn’t likely to be a Jones-Hopkins II. They’re both younger than those two were and have vulnerabilities that could make this a fun affair. Neither man is entering with the sort of momentum Gonzalez and Estrada had last year but they don’t have to meet that bar to deliver a great show.
We won’t know for sure if this is better late than never until the smoke clears on Saturday but it’s still a fight fans want to see. That’s a good place to start.
Cliff’s Notes…
An ongoing study of Ring Magazine’s rankings continues as part of their centennial. For anyone who has been following, while the detailed top 100 is now published there is still more to come. An addendum exploring an additional fifty careers and change will also be published…The news about Jermell Charlo-Brian Castano II is a bummer. It’s one of the best fights on the boxing calendar. Let’s cross fingers they can reschedule promptly…If it’s George Kambosos against Vasyl Lomachenko, that’s a hell of a first defense. Lomachenko enters off a pair of legitimate top ten wins. Devin Haney would be left as the odd man out but his chances are inevitable if he keeps winning…Keith Thurman wants a Crawford contract? Find him one.
Cliff Rold is the Managing Editor of BoxingScene, a founding member of the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board, a member of the International Boxing Research Organization, and a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America.