Floyd Mayweather Jr. (45-0, 26 KO’s) did what everyone expected him to do today in selecting WBA welterweight champion Marcos Maidana (35-3, 31 KO’s) for his next fight on May 3rd on Showtime PPV instead of Amir Khan, who fans seemed to have little interested in seeing Mayweather fight next. In selecting Maidana, Mayweather opted to turn his back to his own poll on the mayweatherpromotions.com website, which saw Khan as the winner.
Mayweather hasn’t said why he decided to ignore the poll results, but it could be the fact that Maidana swamped Khan in three separate polls on ESPN, RingTV and Fightnews. Those polls showed pretty clearly that fans liked the idea of Maidana being Mayweather’s next opponent rather than Khan.
Celebrating his 37th birthday tonight, Mayweather decided he could wait no longer to make the announcement about his next fight. Fans had already heard news leaked from Maidana’s manager this past week about being in negotiations with Mayweather. That was the sign that Khan was not going to be the one to face Mayweather next. It became even more clear during the weekend with Khan going into a rant on his twitter page about feeling disrespected by Mayweather after having won his poll and having to sit around and wait instead of having the fight handed to him. But Maidana deserved the fight against Mayweather a lot more than Khan by virtue of his 4-fight winning streak and his big win over the fighter that many fans see as a copycat of Mayweather in Adrien Broner.
Khan has a 2-fight winning streak, but he’s faced much lesser competition than Maidana. Additionally, Khan really hurt his chances for the Mayweather fight by deciding that he didn’t need to take a fight against former IBF welterweight champion Devon Alexander last December. Whoever told Khan to not take that fight really blew it for him because a win over Alexander would have likely been a big enough win to get Khan the fight with Mayweather.