Before his technical decision victory over Paul McCloskey this past Saturday, WBA Super Lightweight champion Amir Khan re-signed with promoters Golden Boy Promotions and television network HBO to four year extensions according to Dan Rafael of espn.com
“We’ve been negotiating the extension and last week we signed it,” said Richard Schaefer, CEO of Golden Boy Promotions. “We agreed awhile ago that we would want to continue to work together. It took time while we were negotiating the best possible deal for everyone.”
“Amir’s future is so bright,” said Golden Boy president Oscar De La Hoya, who was ringside for the fight against McCloskey. “Amir wants to unify titles. He would also want to move up to 147 pounds eventually. There are many possibilities. He wants to fight the best and we want to make those fights for him. It’s very exciting for us. We will have a great champion for many years to come.”
Said HBO’s Kery Davis, “We believe Amir has a bright future in the sport and is an emerging star. We look forward to his next fight on HBO.”
Khan’s next fight is tentatively supposed to be a July 23 unification bout with American Timothy Bradley Jr. (27-0, 11 KOs), who owns two 140-pound belts. He unified two titles with a 10th-round technical decision victory against Devon Alexander on Jan. 29.
“We are trying to finalize that fight,” Schaefer said. “[Bradley promoter] Gary Shaw is going to be in Los Angeles this week, so we can talk about it some more. There’s been some talk that maybe the Bradley side isn’t going to take the fight or this and that, so I talked to Gary on Monday and wanted to know if we have a fight. He confirmed we have a fight, so we are working on the paperwork.”
“We are excited to continue to work with Amir,” Schaefer said. “He and his team see we have done a good job for Amir, taking his fights to New York and then to Las Vegas, and we know there are huge opportunities for Amir. I can see huge paydays for him. We want to start in July with Amir’s run with the fight against Bradley to get him in position where he can eventually fight for that No. 1 position on the pound-for-pound list.”
