He has walked through the tinkling cash caverns in Las Vegas before, gazed at sixty-feet of his smiling face, mixed it with 11 world champions in his career and never once entered the ring as the betting underdog.
It all changes for Amir Khan on Saturday night at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas when he fights Saul Canelo Alvarez for the WBC middleweight title and starts as a rank outsider in a fight that has been made 8 pounds above his best weight.
Khan has been fighting current, future and fallen world champions for seven years in a career that is a win or two away from being arguably the best in British boxing. Not one of the current British world champions, and there are 12 at the moment, has a record that compares with Khan?s exploits.
Men like Carl Froch, Lennox Lewis, Joe Calzaghe and Naseem Hamed shuffled down the same boxing boulevard, were in and out of hard fights against men that held versions of the world title and Khan is on their exalted periphery. Khan has fought a world champion in 11 of his last 14 fights and Alvarez makes it 12 in 15, a sequence that is genuinely impressive. Alvarez has fought 48 times and Khan has fought more world champions than the Mexican.
