Amir Khan fights Chris Algieri knowing boxing career is on the line

This time last year Amir Khan was on the shortlist of candidates to meet Floyd Mayweather in a Saturday night pay-per-view blockbuster from Las Vegas, the sport’s most prestigious and lucrative platform. Now he’s fighting Chris Algieri on a Friday in Brooklyn on Spike TV, the network that brought you Stripperella, 1,000 Ways to Die and Tattoo Nightmares.

The Bolton puncher has always been proof the road to success is seldom a straight line. Wins over world champions like Devon Alexander, Marcos Maidana, Zab Judah, Andriy Kotelnik and Paulie Malignaggi have pushed him to the fringe of the Hall of Fame discussion, but the high-profile setbacks – a tactically inept knockout loss to Danny Garcia and 54-second destruction at the hands of Breidis Prescott – have often subverted his ascent at the worst possible times.

He’s lived upstairs with the Crawleys and downstairs with Mr Carson and co. Where he spends the all-important summer of his career will depend largely on how the next year unfolds – a chapter that begins with a 12-round welterweight fight against Algieri at the sleek $1bn Barclays Center. Both fighters came in fractions of a pound under the 147lb limit at Thursday’s weigh-in.

The former kickboxer who still lives in his parents’ Long Island basement – a virtual unknown roughly a year ago – is a competent, rangy boxer and underrated athlete who parlayed a win over Emmanuel Taylor into a junior welterweight title shot against Ruslan Provodnikov. Twice floored in the opening round, Algieri showed grit in boxing his way to a split-decision win. That led to a pay-per-view fight with Manny Pacquiao in November, which saw Algieri dropped six times in his first career loss.

“He is a very good boxer, obviously with the height and the reach and the good movement,” Khan said. “He can frustrate fighters and by doing that he can catch them. Look at the Provodnikov fight, that’s what he did. A lot of people thought it would be stopped but he kept boxing, making him fall short and miss.”

Khan will never outrun the questions about his chin, but Algieri – with eight knockouts in 21 paying fights – would seem ill-equipped to ask them. Khan has always shown his best against opponents who rely on speed and boxing ability over weapons-grade power, which suggests Friday’s outing could play out in similar fashion to his better days against Alexander, Judah and Malignaggi.

He is 28 now, more than a decade after the Athens Olympics that made him a household name, happily married with a daughter who turned one on Saturday. He’s parted ways with his long-time trainer Freddie Roach in favour of Virgil Hunter, who has reined in the offensive recklessness and added a new dimension of tactical maturity.

“Could Algieri beat Amir Khan before he came to me? I don’t think so,” the 61-year-old Hunter observed this week. “Amir is learning new things but the other Amir Khan is still here. I still see it in the gym an I am not afraid to call on it in a fight. He might be boxing technically but then all of a sudden, boom! He needs to be able to do both.”

Khan is a lopsided favourite – the oddsmakers have made Algieri an 8-1 underdog – but cannot afford a lapse when so tantalisingly close to boxing’s topmost tier. Therein lie the deceptively high stakes of Friday’s fight, a bout that could potentially vault Khan into a September showdown with Mayweather – or could see him relegated to the low-rent district the very good, but not great, call home.