Amir Khan Got Me Hooked To Boxing!

I have not been a ‘boxing’ fan all my life. In fact, I found it rather boring because I never understood the rules and how it really worked. Similarly, I was never a WWF or a WWE fan, although I did try to follow it will ‘all-my-heart’ because of peer pressure at school. All I could remember today are three names: The Undertaker, Hitman Heart and The Rock. The Rock is an interesting character overall.

It wasn’t that as a kid I never used to like fighting sports, but it was more like it looked ‘lame’ when I saw these guys fighting on WWF. As I grew up, WWE was nothing more than a funny entertainment for me, which of course doesn’t mean that I was a fan.

I liked real fighting as compared to the lame ones. Ask me about Kung-Fu sometime. I loved it. I also happened to practice the basics of Kung Fu for sometime. It was an interesting experience, but I will leave the Kung Fu story for a later date.

Coming back to ‘boxing,’ the sport never inspired me because maybe I never saw it earlier. Or there was no peer pressure that made me follow it. Or another possibility can be that because of PTV only in those days, we never had access to a lot of games and information. All I knew about boxing were two synonymous names of champions, who were Muslims: “Muhammad Ali” and “Mike Tyson”

It was not until recently that I partially got hooked to this sport. I had been hearing about this British Pakistan youngster named “Amir Khan” who made history by winning the WBA World Light-Welterweight Championship in July this year. He is also commonly known as “King Khan” or  the “Pride of Bolton.” Well I never knew all this until Amir Khan defeated Dmitry Salita on 5th December 2009 and the hype reached my ears.

Amir Khan

Dmitry Salita was the first challenger of Amir Khan’s title, who was a much senior and a more experienced fighter. Dmitry Salita is a Ukrainian American from New York, who is an Orthodox Jew. Now with Amir Khan being a practicing Muslim, the media termed this fight as the “fight of faith” and the “holy war.” The interesting part was that Salita was never defeated in his entire career and a lot of people did not think that Amir Khan would be threatening enough for Salita.

Dmitry Salita

The fight was expected to last for 12 Rounds of 3 minute each as this match was being considered as one of the toughest matches. As soon as the match started, Amir Khan knocked Salita down with his first punch in less than 10 seconds. It was hilarious. Salita managed to get up, but he was knocked down second time again by Amir Khan within seconds. The third time he got up again, and was knocked down thrice in the first round. Amir Khan won the fight and retained the title.

Khan & Salita

It is a must watch match. This got me hooked up to boxing. It won’t even waste a lot of your time if you are not a boxing fan. Here is the complete video of the match between Amir Khan vs Dmitry Salita: