NO BELTS on the line with both men coming to the end of their careers, facing one another in a catchweight contest at 149lbs, yet the Brook v Khan clash this weekend in Manchester has ignited more buzz and interest than many championship fights.

This is that rare thing though – a fight that needs no belts on the line to validate its importance or to make it compelling. What there is is a history of rivalry and bad blood, seasoned with plenty of nostalgia over the careers of two fighters who’ve climbed the heights and tasted the lows against the very best of their era.

This of course is a fight that should’ve taken place years before now. However it still retains sufficient interest to have sold out at the Manchester Arena in record time and it will doubtless attract a bounty of PPV buys over and above that.

At the ritual media workout on Wednesday, both men looked in superb condition. Khan, having made the astute decision to join Team Crawford in Colorado for his preparations, is adamant that he’s rolled back the years, relishing training under the tutelage of one of the sport’s most respected trainers, Brian “Bomac” McIntyre, rightly credited with taking Terence Crawford from novice to pound-for-pound-status.

Brook, meanwhile, has after a brief departure returned to familiar territory in the personage of longtime trainer Dominic Ingle, basing himself out at Fuerteventura in the Canaries for the bulk of his preparations.

The great paradox in boxing is that when a fighter is in his prime it’s the sum total of his strengths that dictates his fortunes, while when he enters his decline it’s the sum total of his acquired vulnerabilities and deficiencies. With both Brook and Khan having been stopped more than once – in Brook’s case sustaining not just one but two orbital bone fractures – and with Father Time ensuring the diminution of their respective natural gifts, this is an intriguing fight for all the wrong reasons.

In other words, punch resistance more than Brook’s famed timing and switch-hitting or Khan’s famed hand-speed will likely be the ultimate determinant of who emerges victorious, and there’s a good chance that both men will touch the canvas at least once before matters are concluded. 

Beyond boxing, it seems only yesterday that Amir Khan entered the 2004 Olympic Games a complete unknown to the British public and emerged a 17-year-old superstar with a silver medal and the inordinate pressure on his young shoulders to carry the hopes and dreams of Britain’s put-upon Pakistani-Muslim community at a time when to be either was to be deemed a de facto enemy of the state.

To his credit, Khan dealt with the pressure to represent his community with dignity and pride during this period, and to this day is revered and held up as a role model for young kids from same. A native of Bolton, where he remains based, he has boxed all over the world and benefited from the brains of some of the sport’s greatest trainers – Freddie Roach, Virgil Hunter, Joe Goosen, and now Brian “Bomac” McIntyre prime among them.

Of late though Khan has had his head turned by the supposed virtues of celebrity, spending more time browsing Rolex watches in Knightsbridge and cavorting around luxury hotel penthouses in Dubai than punishing his body and mind in the gym. In his view though, which he stated recently, his prolonged absence from the ring has been a major factor in him being able to handle the rigours of one of his hardest and career-best training camps.

As with most things in life, we shall see.

As for Brook, he’s enjoyed a lifelong association with the Ingle Gym in Sheffield, a veritable British boxing institution out of which has come a raft of world champions and contenders – legends such as Herol Graham, Nassem Hamad, Ryan Rhodes, Johnny Nelson, and Junior Witter. The gym’s founder, Brendan Ingle, enjoyed high status in the game right up until his death in 2018. In his unique and philosophical approach to the sport, both in and out of the ring, he was Britain’s answer to Cus D’Amato, though perhaps with rather than without the laughs.

Kell Brook’s finest moment in a ring came against Shawn Porter all the way back in 2014, when he travelled over to California and wrested Porter’s IBF welterweight title from his grasp. He managed to hold onto the title for three years, until he in turn had it wrested from his grasp by Errol Spence Jr in front of his own fans in Sheffield.

Brook and Khan, then, are two names that have tantalised fans of the sport in the UK for years, the subject of countless debates in pubs, workplaces and gyms up and down the country. Finally those same fans get to see them share a ring to at last end the aforesaid debates with the definitive answer to the question of who between them is the man?

In managing to get both camps to agree terms and make the fight happen, Sky and Boxxer – the latter run by boxing’s new kid on the block Ben Shalom – have pulled off a coup. It has left the likes of Eddie Hearn looking on green with envy, given that he spent a long time trying to make this particular fight, having been involved in the careers of both fighters at various points. Unsurprising then that he’s gone on record dismissing of the event as a “money grab” by two fighters who are “finished.”

Regardless, with no titles on the line other than the right to be recognised as champion of the other, these two ageing gunslingers will dance at least one more time, hoping, the two of them, that Father Time decides to turn his back just long enough to allow them to give the fans a night to remember in Manchester.