The Great British-Pakistani-Muslim Hope

The New York Times Magazine

March 19, 2006

By PAT JORDAN

The young Asian women, with diamond studs in their noses and bindis on their foreheads, stood by the boxing ring of the Braehead Arena in Glasgow, Scotland, their cellphone cameras at the ready. Music blared from the loudspeakers — "We will, we will, rock you!" — and the 6,000 fans in the audience were screaming, cheering, whistling, blowing horns and stamping their feet until a figure in a satin hooded robe appeared and the noise dissolved into a single, bellowing chant, a name. "Khan! Khan! Khan!"

Amir Khan is a slender 19-year-old with smooth skin the color of café con leche. His handshake is weak, his long, delicate fingers as easily crushed, it seems, as the stem of a flower. He began boxing when he was 8, in the tough old mill town of Bolton, in northern England. He is a British citizen of Pakistani descent and a practicing Muslim. At 11, he was a boxing prodigy. By his teens, he was the best young amateur boxer in the United Kingdom. In 2003, when Khan was 16, he won a gold medal at the Junior Olympics, which were held in the United States. One opponent at the event told him that if he fought at the Olympics the next year in Athens, he would "shock the world."

So, Khan says: "I went home and looked at the rules. You had to be 18 to compete in the Olympics." He petitioned the British Amateur Boxing Association to make an exception, but the A.B.A. refused. Khan threatened to fight for Pakistan. The A.B.A. relented, and that summer Khan was named the sole member of the British boxing team. "It would have been an embarrassment to have no boxer on the British team," he says.

Khan advanced to the gold-medal bout by, as the press variously put it, "outclassing," "demoralizing" and "hammering" his first four opponents. His graceful style elicited comparisons with Sugar Ray Leonard and Muhammad Ali. Khan said that his goal was to show British Asian youths that they could achieve whatever they wanted. A British paper claimed Khan was "fighting for all of us" — for white Brits and their countrymen in the immigrant communities.

In the final, Khan faced Mario Kindelan, a 33-year-old three-time world champion from Cuba, who was considered the best fighter in the world, pro or amateur, in the 132-pound weight class. Kindelan had fought hundreds of senior amateur bouts, Khan a mere handful.

Millions of viewers in the U.K. watched on TV as Kindelan outpointed Khan 30-22 for the gold medal. Afterward, the 17-year-old Khan was the toast of Britain, besieged by TV and print media, lawyers, promoters and sponsors who asked him what kind of after-shave he used. And he was the subject of a national debate: should he turn pro and become rich now, or should he remain an amateur until the 2008 Olympics and seek glory for the U.K.?

The debate was effectively settled in May 2005, when Khan met Kindelan in Bolton for an amateur rematch. "The kid took the Cuban to school," Frank Warren, a boxing promoter known as "the Don King of British Boxing," told me. After the fight, Khan, with no amateurs left to challenge him, turned pro and signed with Warren's Sports Network. Warren, in his 50's, had a plan to make Khan a world champion and a millionaire by his 21st birthday.

It is a plan that has gone smoothly so far. Khan has won all six of his fights, including in January a first-round TKO of Vitali Martynov, a highly rated Belarussian who had won 10 of his previous 11 fights. When Khan turns 20 later this year, he will be eligible to fight for a British lightweight crown. In the meantime, Warren is making plans to take Khan to the United States for his professional debut outside Europe. Two years from now, Warren says, he hopes to have Khan positioned to fight for the world championship.

More:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/magazine/319boxer.html