Soon after Amir Khan suffered his KO loss to Danny Garcia, rumors concerning the future of Freddie Roach coaching Khan had developed. In a various interviews Khan had mentioned Roach’s name and how he would like to change up with Freddie.
Many boxing fans took their thoughts to forums, and countless fans had interpreted that Amir was either pondering or had already decided to move on and separate from Freddie Roach.
In case you were one of those people worried about the future of the popular duo, don’t be concerned. According to a recent interview of Freddie Roach by RingTV.com, this is not the case at all.
When asked about this subject, Roach said the following:
“I spoke with Amir and his dad yesterday, and the idea of changing trainers never came up. I told them that if they think that I’m too busy, and ‘if you need help getting somebody else, then I’ll help you.’ They said, ‘no, no, everything’s fine.’ They said ‘we just need to maybe get better sparring partners.’ So I had a very nice breakfast with Shah Khan and Amir. So we had a nice meeting yesterday, and no one talked about getting fired.”
I had my doubts when it came to the idea of Khan separating from Roach because it is Roach who polished Khan and was able to successfully prepare him for numerous tough opponents.
There are too many different opinions of Roach out there—some good and some not so good—but, all in all, Roach is a world-class trainer with a massive amount of knowledge and the ability to effectively transfer that wisdom to his students.
While sometimes changing trainers does lead to better results, those are very rare occasions, with most of those decisions leading to further debilitation of a fighter’s already learned skills. For Khan, who has been with Roach for a long time and has learned Freddie’s way of training, going a different direction would be a self-induced career suicide.
“We talked about fighting again in December. So I was open to December because I have Chavez in September and Pacquiao in November. We figured that we could come back in December and that would work out fine. They want to fight in December so that there won’t be any interference with anybody else,” continued Roach.
Seems like team Kahn had talked to Roach about the fact that he no longer wishes to be number two during his training and wants to have all of Roach’s time and attention when preparing for a fight. In previous training camps, Roach would interlace Pacquiao’s and Khan’s preparation, flying Amir out to the Philippines for part of his training camp.
I think that as a young and obviously emotional fighter, Amir needs that full attention, as it would benefit his self-esteem as well as his state of mind.
Personally I am not a big fan of his, but Khan is still a world-class fighter with tremendous potential. If only he filtered some of the things that he sometimes says, he would limit the negative attention he receives.
When touching on the subject of his current loss and a possible rematch, Roach said:
“It’s just a situation where Amir got caught. He made a mistake and he got caught by a left hook. He went out there a little too early and he got caught. We had planned to out-box this guy. But then Amir started to exchange with him. That’s when he got caught pulling away. He had his hand down. That’s something that we worked on during the fight, but it happens. This happens in boxing. If we get a rematch, we will out-box him. I would like the rematch right away. There’s no sense even thinking about 147 until we show that we can beat this guy at 140.”
