Amir Khan, exciting youth was ruined to ashes after back to back bout
losses to DannyGarcia. But his return as hero after beating Carlos Molina to pulp in the LA Sports Arena to a neighbourhood of east Los Angeles on Saturday night.
Danny Garcia and his mind-games father, Angel, , who knocked Khan off
his perch with a left hook from hell earlier this year, appears willing to risk the lengthy odds against him landing that sucker punch again in a re-match.
The Garcias had just seen the Bolton express land enough bolts of lightning to generate a year’s electricity for Molina’s impoverished home district not far from the LA Sports Arena but remained obdurately unimpressed.
‘We’ll fight Khan again and knock him out again,’ they said .’Even though
we know that if he had beaten us he would never have given us a re-match.’
Maybe not. Khan has battened down his defences and acquired self-restraint
in his first camp with new trainer Virgil Hunter. But he has done so without sacrificing the blistering hand speed or dynamic intensity which hallmark one of the most exciting talents in the prize-ring today.
And yes, we are talking here about Khan, at just turned 26, despite the flaws he is grafting to eradicate from his game and the detractors who are so quick to pounce on his inconsistencies. There is no more exciting natural talent in boxing right now, even though Khan will be required to prove as much against opponents more formidable than prize-fighting’s version of the Hobbit who came shuffling out of the opposite corner this weekend
They say punch-bags don’t hit back but the diminutive Molina proved to
be the exception, albeit not often enough to prevent him losing all ten of the scheduled twelve rounds before his corner men called a humane halt to the one-side proceedings. This peon praise for Khan’s renaissance after two successive but peculiar losses has to be qualified by Molina’s limitations of size, ability, experience and hitting power.
Yet they also say that you can do no more than obliterate whoever is put in front of you. Khan did that in overwhelming style and Britain should not lose the faith with its most prominent and courageous ambassador for Anglo-Islam relations. Molina had been hand-picked as a stepping-stone towards Khan’s rehabilitation but he still had to be beaten and the pot-shots he fired in retaliation had to be weathered as evidence that the chin in a question is not fatally Achillean after all.
The new Khan we had been promised boxed with enough self-control and
less hazardous game plan to suggest that our former world light-welterweight champion can reclaim his place among the elite, and he had two fractured hands to show for his night's work. Although the world championship he wants back may not come quite as soon as he is predicting. Khan said; ‘I will fight Garcia again whenever and wherever he wants.’ The feeling is mutual, even if the money is doing much of the talking when Danny boy says: 'I’m open to a second fight.’
But Garcia is scheduled to defend his unified title against Zab Judah in February so the re-match with Khan will have to wait at least until June or July. Khan will plug the gap with another confidence building bout in March or April, before marrying his fiancée in May. Suddenly the mists of doubt have cleared and the sun is shining on Khan again.
That warmth should help heal the damage to the right hand, which he feared he had broken in hitting Molina so often. The pain came as a reminder of his ex-trainer Freddie Roach’s assertion that Khan has a recurrent problem there. Not that Molina would have noticed. So sharp and rapid were the multi-punch combinations with which Khan hit him repeatedly that as early as the second round Molina’s face looked as if a saucepan of boiling water had been thrown over it.
By the fourth he was badly gashed above the left eye and only the expertise of one of world boxing’s best cuts men, Miguel Diaz, kept him going to the end of the tenth. By then, however, Molina had lost not only every round but also the strength to pull out a one-punch KO and his team wisely decided he had already been heroic beyond the call of duty.
Khan had boxed with smarter attention to trainer’s orders but for we who delight in watching him it was reassuring to see that his warrior instincts will never be tamed altogether. He said: ‘I expect to become an even more complete boxer after more fights under Virgil.’
Hunter said: ‘He is on his way again to becoming a truly great boxer.’
Golden Boy promoter Richard Schaefer, whose belief and investment in Khan had been redeemed, went further: ‘I have always been convinced that Amir will be the best pound-for-pound boxer in the world.’
First things first.
Our boy is back. Well, back on track if not all the way back to the top quite yet.
King Khan, as he is called, is looking like a Prince of the ring again, which is no small achievement for one who was sliding towards that precipice prior to this Saturday night in the City of the Angels.
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