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Amir Khan’s trainer Brian McIntyre was close to throwing in the towel during Khan’s highly anticipated welterweight showdown with Kell Brook.
Khan (34-6, 21 KOs) and Brook (40-3, 28 KOs), two of the most high-profile fighters to emerge from England in the past decade, finally swapped punches inside the ring in a 12-round welterweight bout (contracted at 149 pounds) Saturday night at Manchester Arena in Manchester. Though the fight was billed as a 50-50 fight, in reality it was a landslide victory for Brook, who wobbled Khan as early as the first round and never looked back. Their bitter rivalry quickly came to a close in the sixth round, as the referee intervened to prevent Khan from incurring more punishment.
Khan took a beating in the penultimate fifth round, which nearly convinced his trainer McIntyre to pull the plug at that moment.
“He showed a lot of heart, man,” McIntyre said of his charge in an interview with Pro Boxing Fans. “I was about to stop it in the [fifth], man because he was taking too much punishment.
“But he came to fight. He did his best. He did his best. I take my hat off to him.”
This was Khan’s first time working with McIntyre, best known as the head coach of WBO welterweight titlist Terence Crawford of Omaha, Nebraska, whom Khan fought and lost to in 2019. McIntyre was also in Crawford’s corner when Crawford took on Brook in 2020, beating the Sheffield native by fourth-round stoppage.
McIntyre said Khan was executing their game plan of sticking and moving to a tee for the majority of the rounds but failed to prevent Brook sneaking in power shots toward the end of each of them.
“If you think about when Amir was using his jab and moving side to side, he was winning the rounds,” McIntyre said. “He was winning part of the rounds, and then Kell would come on at the end and try to steal the rounds from him…The game plan that we had for him was to move, side to side movement and try to let his hands go, and it was working.”
After the bout, a noticeably bruised-up Khan said he was contemplating retirement. As for Brook, no sooner did he have his arms raised that middleweight contender Chris Eubank Jr. and rising welterweight Conor Benn both challenged him to fights.