Pakistani Muslim emerges as Britain's king of the ring
By Pat Jordan The New York Times

MONDAY, MARCH 20, 2006
The young Asian women, with diamond studs in their noses and bindis on their foreheads, stood by the boxing ring of the Braehead Arena in Glasgow, their cellphone cameras at the ready. Music blared from the loudspeakers - "We will, we will, rock you!" - and the 6,000 fans in the audience were screaming, cheering, whistling, blowing horns and stamping their feet until a figure in a satin hooded robe appeared and the noise dissolved into a single, bellowing chant. "Khan! Khan! Khan!" Amir Khan is a slender 19-year-old with smooth skin the color of café con leche. His handshake is weak, his long, delicate fingers as easily crushed, it seems, as the stem of a flower. He began boxing when he was 8, in the tough old mill town of Bolton, northern England. He is a British citizen of Pakistani descent and a practicing Muslim. At 11, he was a boxing prodigy. By his teens, he was the best young amateur boxer in Britain. When he was 16, he won a gold medal at the Junior Olympics, which were held in the United States. One opponent told him that if he fought at the Olympics the next year in Athens, he would "shock the world." So, Khan says: "I went home and looked at the rules. You had to be 18 to compete in the Olympics." He petitioned the British Amateur Boxing Association to make an exception, but the association refused. Khan threatened to fight for Pakistan. The association relented, and that summer Khan was named the sole member of the British boxing team. "It would have been an embarrassment to have no boxer on the British team," he says. Khan advanced to the gold- medal bout by, as the press variously put it, "outclassing," "demoralizing" and "hammering" his first four opponents. His graceful style elicited comparisons with Sugar Ray Leonard and Muhammad Ali. Khan said his goal was to show British Asian youths they could achieve whatever they wanted. A British newspaper claimed Khan was "fighting for all of us" - for white Britons and their countrymen in the immigrant communities. In the final, Khan faced Mario Kindelan, a 33-year-old three-time world champion from Cuba, who was considered the best fighter in the world, pro or amateur, in the 132-pound lightweight class. Kindelan had fought hundreds of senior amateur bouts, Khan a mere handful. Millions of viewers in Britain watched on TV as Kindelan outpointed Khan 30 to 22 for the gold medal. Afterward, the 17-year-old Khan was the toast of Britain, besieged by TV and print media, lawyers, promoters and sponsors who asked him what kind of after- shave he used. And he was the subject of a national debate: should he turn pro and become rich now, or should he remain an amateur until the 2008 Olympics and seek glory for Britain? The debate was effectively settled in May 2005, when Khan met Kindelan in Bolton for an amateur rematch. "The kid took the Cuban to school," Frank Warren, a leading boxing promoter, said. After the fight, Khan, with no amateurs left to challenge him, turned pro and signed with Warren's Sports Network. Warren, in his 50s, had a plan to make Khan a world champion and a millionaire by his 21st birthday. It is a plan that has gone smoothly so far. Khan has won all six of his fights. When he turns 20 later this year, he will be eligible to fight for a British lightweight crown. Warren is making plans to take Khan to the United States for his professional debut outside Europe. Two years from now, Warren says, he hopes to have Khan positioned to fight for the world championship. Khan's first professional fight, against David Bailey, a car mechanic and journeyman boxer, took place last July 16, nine days after the terrorist bombings in London, which killed 56 and wounded more than 700. What was equally shocking was that three of the four bombers were born in Britain to Pakistani parents, young men whose lives in the north of England had not been all that different from Khan's. They were Muslims who frequented a boxing club. Khan knocked out Bailey at 1:46 of the first round to the cheers of "Khan's Barmy Army," a dozen or so of his friends who waved British and Pakistani flags that had been stitched together. In an interview afterward, Khan dedicated his first professional victory to the victims of the attacks. "Hopefully, I'm one of the people who can help stop this happening," he said. "I wanted everyone to be together and to be happy and to be nice to each other." The papers described Khan, who entered the ring with someone in his entourage carrying the Union Jack while "Land of Hope and Glory" played over the loudspeakers, as Britain's most important multicultural role model. He met the queen; he talked boxing with Prime Minister Tony Blair. The next month, Khan did not sound so enthusiastic about being a role model. "A lot of things have changed around me, and that's why it can be quite hard," he told a British reporter. "It makes me feel I've lost a lot of my youth. You know, I'm only 18, and I don't really want to be a spokesman for anyone." Khan is not the first British Asian Muslim boxer. There was Prince Naseem Hamed in the 90s, and then there is Khan. Hamed was a first-generation British citizen whose parents immigrated from Yemen. He became a world featherweight champion and then, as his successes and riches increased, grew fat and indifferent to boxing. During his championship years, Hamed was never a hero to either British Muslims or whites. "There's never been a history of Muslim boxers in the U.K. or anywhere," Colin Hart, a British boxing historian and boxing columnist for The Sun, says. "Maybe they don't have the nature to fight?" Walid Phares, a professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University, says the aversion Muslims feel toward boxing has less to do with their nature than with their religion. "Boxing was never widely practiced in the Muslim world," he says, except as a means of "global defense because of a theological debate." Phares, whose latest book is "Future Jihad," says that "mainstream Muslims don't forbid boxing, but they see it as a training exercise, or sport, not something to make money on." What makes Khan unique among fighters is not only that he's a Muslim of Asian descent but also that he comes from a middle-class family; he grew up in a mixed, white-Asian neighborhood; he doesn't seem to be angry, and he has become a national icon, the first truly assimilated Asian Muslim hero. "Most Asians would rather play cricket," Hart says. They got it from the colonial days. But Amir, he's a real fighter. Now, with Amir, you're seeing more and more Asian boys joining boxing clubs." Two days before Khan's third professional fight, last November, Warren held a news conference at the Glasgow Marriott. Standing alone against the back wall of the room, a young man with a shaved head, a hoop earring and tattoos, watched Khan intently - Steve Gethin, a 27-year-old English factory worker and Khan's opponent. Gethin had lost 9 of his previous 10 fights. Unlike Khan, whose face and body were unscathed, Gethin bore the history of each of his losses: scar tissue over his eyebrows, cauliflower ears, a bruise over his left eye. But Gethin said he was not jealous. "Khan's good for the sport," he added. "We'll find out who's the toughest." "very fond of Frank," and Warren said that King was "one of the brightest people" he had ever met. When one newspaper reported that Mike Tyson once punched out Warren in a hotel room, Warren denied it and threatened to sue the paper that printed such a scandalous claim. "I'm not frightened of anyone," Warren said. Warren said Khan has no weakness as a boxer, or as a person. "He doesn't drink. He goes to mosque every day. He's well grounded. He respects the talent he's been given. If he stays this way, he'll be a huge superstar." Oliver Harrison, Khan's trainer, has no doubts. "Amir's one in a million," Harrison said. "Talent and character." Khan said he doesn't worry about succumbing to the usual pitfalls of fame. He has no interest in money; his family handles that. He doesn't smoke or drink or touch drugs, and as for girls, he said: "I don't have time. I'm on a mission to be world champion and retire with a lot of money to help my family." On the night of the November fight, Khan spent the day hanging out in the hotel lobby with a dozen or so members of "Khan's Barmy Army." Mike Hoyt, a member of Khan's team, and I watched him from a pub. Khan was posing for a photograph with a woman whose much taller boyfriend was taking their picture with her cellphone. She looked ecstatic. The woman and her boyfriend who had just been with Khan entered the pub. I went over to talk to them. His name was Shamis Hamid; he was a banker and a Pakistani Muslim. Her name was Pamy Sandhu. She was an Indian Sikh from Wolverhampton and a police officer in the West Midlands. Sandhu said: "My father's been in England for 38 years and still thinks of himself as Indian. I said, 'No, you're British.' That's why Amir is so important to us. He's a Muslim and a good person. We need Muslim icons to stand up for us, to show the world we are all decent people. He flies the flag for all British Muslims, and youngsters should follow him instead of being a pain on the streets." At 10 p.m., Khan walked into the arena amid the flash of cameras and TV lights and the Asian girls aiming their cellphone cameras at him. He was wearing his trademark silver trunks, but with a slight alteration: tartan trim had been sewn in. Gethin stood in his corner, his blue eyes wide. The bell rang and Khan loped into the center of the ring and began to stalk Gethin. Suddenly he attacked Gethin, hitting him with three quick punches before Gethin could react. The fight didn't last long. The referee stopped it in the third round, after Khan again battered Gethin's head with so many quick blows that Gethin could only cover his face with his gloves. Khan raised his arms in victory. The members of "Khan's Barmy Army" poured out of their seats. They began to leave the arena, waving their Union Jack-Pakistani flag at the seated fans. The Scottish fans began to throw things at them. Bottles. Sharpened coins. Cups of beer. "Khan's Barmy Army" covered their heads. Security appeared from the runways, surrounded Khan's "army" and hustled them out of the arena. Later that night I noticed Khan's friends, Majid and Sajid, and others from his Barmy Army milling about in the lobby. "What happened after the fight?" I asked. Sajid, looking dazed, said: "That's the first time that ever happened. The fans didn't understand us. Our flag was a sign of multicultural harmony, but they didn't get it." Majid said, "That's all it takes, a few idiots like that to start it in other places, too." The next morning, the British and Scottish papers all carried stories about Khan's brilliant victory, but there was little mention of the near riot his fans almost caused when they trotted through the arena with their "Khan's Barmy Army" flag.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/19/news/boxer.php#