While some boxing fans feel that a win over 32-year-old Luis Collazo (35-5, 18 KO’s) isn’t a big enough win to catapult Amir Khan (28-3, 19 KO’s) into a big fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr., Ricky Hatton thinks Khan should be given the Mayweather fight off of a victory over Collazo. Hatton admires Collazo’s ability after having beaten him by a 12 round decision 7 years ago when Collazo was much younger and in possession of the WBA 147lb title.
Collazo has been hanging around the sport ever since, but he stopped fighting well known opposition after a loss to Andre Berto in 2009. Collazo went through a 5 year period where he fought largely C level opposition until his win over Victor Ortiz earlier this year. Ortiz is arguably a low B level fighter, if not a C level guy at this point in his career.
It looks like Mayweather and Golden Boy Promotions aren’t going to make Khan beat any of the younger top contenders to get the fight against Mayweather, which is probably why Collazo was selected for the fight. He’s had one big win [if you want to call it that] in the past 9 years and that was in 2005 when he beat Miguel Angel Gonzalez to win the WBA welterweight title. All of Collazo’s important fights against well-known fighters, he lost them all until he got the fight against Ortiz.
“He [Khan] would have proven he deserves the shot [against Mayweather] then,” Hatton told Mancunianmatters. “I just think it’s a horrible fight for Amir. There are easier fights he could have had. My advice to Amir is, if his team think he will go to war like he has done in the past, it’s going to be a very, very tough night for him. You’d like to think Amir will beat him if he sticks to his boxing.”
If Golden Boy wanted to show that Khan really deserved the Mayweather fight, they’d have matched him against someone younger like Keith Thurman, Kell Brook or Devon Alexander to see what he could do against one of them instead of having him fight Collazo. You can make a strong argument that the Collazo fight is basically just a way of making sure that Khan gets the Mayweather fight.
