THE words Amir and Khan grind Kell Brook’s gears in much the same way the word Brexit grinds the gears of half the British population. Each time he hears it, a part of him dies, and the more it is said, the more Brook wishes it could be erased from his mind and that he could dissociate from Khan, his main British rival, entirely.
It these days seems futile, too, to even mention Khan around Brook and vice versa. Unlike Candyman logic, nothing will come from repeating the names over and over again, putting them together on their behalf. Nothing will show up. Nothing will happen. Repeating them won’t bring the fight any closer to happening, nor will it get back the years both have wasted talking about a fight that seems destined to be looked upon as The One That Got Away.
On a scale of one to ten, then, how bored is Kell Brook of talking about Amir Khan?
“Ten,” he told Boxing News this week. “I think we should just stop that right there.”
But we don’t, of course. We don’t stop there and the reason we don’t stop there is because Brook and Khan, like Brexit, is both an irritant and a subject of no small amount of fascination. As much as it frustrates, we want to know more about it. We want answers to questions. We want to vent.
And Brook’s happy to do that – vent.
“It will never happen,” he told Boxing News, “and whose fault do you think it is? It’s high risk and high reward for him but he doesn’t want the high risk. He lives a certain way, he has a certain lifestyle, and he spends money quick. He wants the money, I’m sure, but he doesn’t want the defeat.
“He’s just trying to capitalise on his name at this point. He’s just being a whore. He wants easy fights against smaller opponents and he wants that Saudi Arabia money if he can get it. Real boxing know this and they also are only interested in seeing Khan box me. They don’t want to see him box featherweights in Saudi Arabia.”
Khan’s last fight was indeed a peculiar ‘fight’ in Saudi Arabia against a former featherweight champion, Billy Dib. Brook, meanwhile, having sat out the whole of 2019, returns to the ring on Saturday (February 8) against American Mark DeLuca, which represents the first fight of his final run at a world title.
What it won’t do, however, is bring him any closer to securing an all-British fight against Khan, a reality he has by now come to accept.
“I’d have to live with myself (if it never happens),” he said. “It would niggle me, yeah, because it’s the fight the fans deserve but there’s nothing I can do about it at the moment.”
Forgetting Khan for a moment, Brook, 38-2 (26), has other options at welterweight and isn’t averse to once again sharing a ring with IBF champion Errol Spence, the man who dethroned him at Bramall Lane back in 2017.
“My dream fight would obviously be a Spence rematch,” he said. “I know I can beat him. I’d prepare better. I wouldn’t blow up in weight again. I was forced into a mandatory and because of how stubborn I am I wore myself down making the weight and there were many things not right. All I know is if we made that fight again you would see a completely different Kell Brook.”
As Kell Brook works on the unveiling of a completely different Kell Brook, the rest of us are resigned to Brook vs. Khan or Khan vs. Brook sounding like the same old story – should’ve happened, could’ve happened, but unlikely now to ever happen.
Alas, when boxing gets it right, it’s as good as any sport out there, but, when it gets it wrong, it’s often shambolic and this, a mess of epic proportions, is just another example of a fight that needed to have been sorted long ago.
