Amir Khan, still a world champion but headed for hospital, mumbled through the bruises and cuts that dressed a face rearranged only moments before by Marcos Maidana: “I proved tonight I’ve got a chin.”
What an understatement. The 4,632 fans scattered around an arena that holds twice that number in the bowels of the Mandalay Bay last night were brought to their feet in a frenzy in round 10 as the Argentinian challenger – who came to the fight with an 87% stoppage record – belted Khan from one side of the ring to the other.
He landed blows, unanswered, that would have destroyed any other fighter of comparable size in the world, including his friend and stablemate, Manny Pacquiao. Yet, drawing on his phenomenal fitness, the boy from Bolton somehow remained upright to retain his WBA light-welterweight title. The judges gave it to him over 12 rounds by margins of 114-111 twice and 113-112. Had one judge, Jerry Roth, not bizarrely awarded the final round to the champion, Khan would have won by a single point on all three cards. I had him winning 115-112.
In those three minutes of the 10th, however, he not only won a fight but the respect and admiration of everyone in boxing. It was a round that, surely, convinced the doubters that his 54-second blowout by Breidis Prescott two years ago can now be consigned to the past.
“What a great fight it was, man,” Khan said, before heading for a CAT scan. "I’m sure HBO are happy. I’m sure Sky are happy. This is boxing, and you have to fight the best. You can’t take any shortcuts. Most people said to me, ‘You’ve got no chin’. Well I’ve proved them wrong.
“He was strong. I hit him with some big shots. And there were times in the fight when I got caught, but took it. I made a few mistakes that I won’t make again. Sometimes I fight with my heart too much. But I’m young. I’m still learning.”
David Haye, the WBA heavyweight champion, cheered him on from ringside and said later: "I always knew he had the heart. And, with all the training he’s done with Freddie Roach and Manny Pacquiao, the best fighter on the planet, you could clearly see he’s learned how to weather a storm. He knows how to kill the clock. The tricks he didn’t know in the Prescott fight, he definitely knows now – and that’s why he’s still the champion of the world.
"I’m not surprised that he got through the 10th round, but I’m unhappy that he took those shots. The rounds of sparring that he’s been doing in the gym with some of these great fighters, I knew that would pay off. But, seeing the state he was in at the end of the round, I thought: ‘How can he get through it?’ But he did what great champions do. He found a way to win.
"Just one of those punches and anyone would be in real trouble, but Amir took them time and time again, to the back of the head, uppercuts, everything. But he showed his toughness, showed his grit and I’m really, really proud of him.
“If you’re not in absolutely the best condition, no way in a million years will any boxer in any weight division in any era be able to get through that kind of onslaught, no matter how good his chin might be. It wasn’t just one or two punches; it was, like, 15 or 20 clean punches. His legs were gone but his powers of recovery were of someone who is super-fit.”
It was looking like an easy night’s work in round one. Khan dropped Maidana with a vicious left to the body that had the Argentinian writhing in agony and, were there more time left, he might have finished him off there. “I’m still feeling that punch now,” Maidana said an hour later.
He recovered, though, and grew stronger, rolling forward with no apparent fear of being knocked out as he hurled 496 power punches. Even though only a quarter of them found their target, they did their job.
After commanding many of the early and middle rounds with his speed and accuracy, Khan made a huge mistake, one forced on him by Maidana’s insistent assaults: he went to the ropes and covered up. It was there that Maidana had much of his success, threading huge uppercuts through his tight guard and ripping shots to his ribs on both flanks in a vain effort to bring his gloves down.
Roach admitted later: “Maidana’s pressure put Amir on the ropes. We planned to move over and under those punches but he got caught on the ropes and he paid for it. It almost cost us the fight. Amir is a very aggressive person by nature. I wanted him to control it with the jab but he turned it on right away. That’s part of his DNA. We tried to go to the body. If he had done it a bit more, he would have had more success.”
Khan had two 10-8 rounds, the first and the fifth, when the referee Joe Cortez docked Maidana a point for elbowing on the break. The challenger fought a sometimes spiteful fight, but it is part of his make-up.
While Maidana thought he had won the fight, he was gracious enough to admit later that he should not have moved to leave the ring immediately after he heard the scores. “I thought they should have been closer,” he said. “But it is sport. It happens. It was a great fight, I know that.”
Oscar De La Hoya called it: “the fight of the year.” He may be right.
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