Kell Brook waiting on Amir Khan to make decision

Kell Brook has a fair amount of options if Amir Khan goes another direction.

Photo by George Wood/Getty Images

If Kell Brook doesn’t face Amir Khan in his next outing, then the former welterweight titleholder and current junior middleweight mandatory challenger will have a decision to make about what’s next for him: go back to 147 or go after a title at 154?

Promoter Eddie Hearn still hasn’t given up on the Khan-Brook fight — he expects Khan, who could face Terence Crawford instead, to make up his mind “in the next week.” But he sounds like he knows there’s at least a 50-50 shot it doesn’t happen, and that Kell will have to figure out where to go next.

Here’s what Hearn said:

“Kell has got the opportunity to fight Jarrett Hurd. He will be the mandatory. That could be the next fight for Hurd, or the one after. … Kell has got to decide, if he doesn’t get Khan, does he move back to 147 pounds and fight the likes of Shawn Porter, Danny Garcia or Jessie Vargas?”

At the end of Brook’s rather unimpressive win over Michael Zerafa last Saturday, Sky Sports commentator Carl Froch remarked, essentially, that Brook (38-2, 26 KO) should stay as far away from Jarrett Hurd (23-0, 16 KO) as possible, and a lot of fans have expressed similar thoughts in the last few days. Hurd is a big junior middleweight, a powerful puncher, and a hell of a fighter. He’s also, at 28, right in his prime, while the 32-year-old Brook really looked like he was sliding against Zerafa.

If Brook decides to try to boil back down to 147, he’s talked about WBC titleholder Porter and former two-division champion Garcia, but Hearn mentioned Vargas (28-2-2, 10 KO) for a reason, that reason being that Vargas, unlike Porter and Garcia, is a DAZN fighter. He’s coming off of a draw with Thomas Dulorme on Oct. 6, and the former titlist is 1-1-2 in his last four outings. It would be a challenging but winnable gamble for Brook, and could set up a title fight if he were victorious.

Sooner than later, we’ll know what direction these guys are going to go. They could still surprise a lot of people and finally make the fight, making all of this other speculation ultimately pointless, which would be fine, at least it’d be more than them talking about each other.