Amir Khan's trainer Virgil Hunter has spoken of his initial reluctance to approve of Khan's May 7 fight with Saul Alvarez.
Shortly after the shock announcement of the fight, in which Khan will fight above welterweight for this first time in his career to challenge Alvarez for his WBC middleweight title, Khan revealed he had had to persuade disciplinarian Hunter that it was right for him to be the talented Mexican's opponent at Las Vegas' T-Mobile Arena.
Khan, the significant underdog and largely because he is expected to be the far smaller man, eventually convinced Hunter that the fight was winnable and it was his reading of the match-up that inspired Hunter to allow the fight to proceed.
"It was Shah (Khan, Amir's father) who came to me, and initially I wasn't for the fight, but I hadn't seen Amir yet," said American Hunter, who also trains Andre Ward, widely considered one of the world's finest fighters.
"I wasn't for the fight: what changed my outlook on it was Amir's response to me when I asked him why did he want this fight and his response to me was quite assuring that he understood what he was going up against and what he was getting into.
"Off of that, I felt much more confident in his ability to be competitive, and win the fight. He understood what he could and could not do."
Khan recognises that regardless of his and Hunter's confidence, he is widely thought to have little more than an outside chance of victory given Alvarez is not only significantly bigger and more powerful, but also a polished and underrated boxer.
Hunter insisted Ward was similarly overlooked when entering the Super Six super-middleweight tournament he eventually won in 2011, having defeated, among others, Mikkel Kessler and Carl Froch, and he said that the two situations compare.
"Andre going into the Super Six: I know everybody viewed him as the underdog, but I didn't," he said.
"I don't view Amir as an underdog in this fight. I'm very confident in his abilities, otherwise I'd be doing him a disservice if I viewed him as an underdog. No, I view him as the top dog.
"That's how we're approaching the fight, we're not approaching the fight hoping to get victory, hoping that it goes our way: it's a determination to get victory and to make it go our way."
Source: PA
