Amir Khan-Chris Algieri was the highest rated cable television fight in the last eight years. Although Amir Khan did not dominate his New York opponent on PBC on Spike TV, the numbers may be enticing enough to land him the Mayweather fight.
His trainer Freddie Roach feels that Khan is not an entertaining fighter anymore and doesn’t feel like his performance last Friday warrants a Floyd Mayweather fight.
“He will not get the Mayweather fight after that performance, no,” Roach told ThaBoxingVoice.com off Khan’s performance against Algieri.
Roach feels like Khan’s style has changed so much, and the clinching is a turn-off.
“The thing is he makes fights boring,” Roach said. “He holds too much. The referee is breaking fighters up every 2 minutes. His new strategy is to exchange and hold instead of exchange and get out of the pocket. I didn’t like his performance, but I think he won.”
Roach also feels it’s hard to gauge how popular a fighter is on free television because you just don’t know what it’s up against on the night.
The numbers for Khan-Algieri were impressive for boxing standards, but it did get outdrawn on the same night by women’s college softball. So Roach may have a point.
“Free television is like hard to gauge; maybe there’s nothing else on,” Roach said. “You can’t really judge that like pay-per-view because you know pay-per-view people really want to watch that fight. You can’t really judge it that way. It never worked that way when I was around with free TV. You know the budget of the fight were a lot smaller. I remember when Virgil Hill fought on ABC, the budget for the fight was $300,000. Right now they seem to be paying these guys some good dollars and so forth on the free TV. I’m not sure how long that will last.”
