Amir Khan’s chin was a problem for him, from the earliest days of his career until Saturday in Manchester, England, against Kell Brook in one of the biggest fights of his life.
Brook and Khan entered the fight Saturday on the backstretch of excellent careers, but each looking like the end was at hand.
Brook, though, had far more left than Khan, who was hurt by the first clean punch Brook landed and was wobbly around the ring at Manchester Arena until referee Victor Loughlin mercifully stopped it 51 seconds into the sixth round.
“I always knew that was going to happen,” Brook said. “It was a matter of time before I got him out of there. Listen, what a feeling. That’s the kind of fight I wanted to be involved in when I was a kid and walked into the gym.”
The bitter rivalry between the men stretched back to their amateur days in England, when Khan won an Olympic team spot over Brook. There had been negotiations over the years to put them together, but they never got it done until Saturday when neither was near his peak.
Brook, though, looked like a reasonable facsimile of the guy who once held the IBF welterweight title. He was walking Khan down almost from the first bell, blasting him with a straight right hand. Khan never went down despite the beating, but he was stumbling around the ring frequently.
Khan was hurt by an uppercut in the third and by combinations throughout the fight. According to CompuBox, Brook landed 64 of 154 power punches, most of which made Khan loopy.
Khan’s clearly at the end of his career and it would be nothing short of professional malpractice if a promoter put him in the ring again.
“I need to sit down with my family,” Khan said after the loss. “That love for the sport is not there anymore like it was before. I felt quite flat, I think that’s maybe a sign I should be calling it a day, but let’s see.”
The win was probably the biggest of Brook’s career, and might be a nudge for him to walk off into the sunset. He was brutally beaten, stopped by Terence Crawford in his last outing, and he’s not good enough at this point to deal with the elites at welterweight.
He was more than enough, though, to deal with Khan, and it gave him the kind of win he’d long dreamed of getting.