Amir Khan vs Canelo Alvarez: Khan's sacrifices and risks could pay off in Las Vegas - Steve Bunce

The Briton has eliminated distractions from training and has nothing to lose on Saturday night

Amir Khan (Getty)

In 1959 the fallen world heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson wore sunglasses, a wig and a look of painful disbelief on his face when he crept in secret from Yankee Stadium in New York after a dark night for American heavyweights.

An hour earlier Patterson had lost his world title to Sweden's Ingemar Johansson in a shock that nobody in the business could explain. Ingo, as he was affectionately known, was a playboy and had arrived in America for the fight with his girlfriend, who looked like Gothenburg's answer to Jane Mansfield. The pre-fight conferences for the ageing press corps were interspersed with enough playful necking to make even the hardened hacks blush. Several papers in New York despatched a fashion correspondent to Ingo's training camp in the Catskills Mountains for updates on the girlfriend's summery frocks.

Ingo never had a chance, so the boys wrote, and on the night he dropped Patterson seven times and after just 2:03 of round three the slaughter was over. Patterson's shame demanded the disguised exit from the glare of the same men that had marvelled at Ingo's stupidity in bringing a girlfriend to training camp. However, the sensible thinking is that training camps are austere, smelly retreats with few perks, laughs and certainly no amorous interludes.

Something similar happened to Amir Khan in 2008 when the idol of British boxing was a single fight or so away from a world title and he met Colombia's Breidis Prescott in Manchester in front of a packed and devoted house of admirers. Prescott ruined the Khan party and the fight was over inside sixty seconds; Khan bravely faced the press that sombre night, but he would have fled in disguise if it had been an option.

Khan has been based in California since his loss to Prescott, leaving for the airport and Los Angeles inside a week of the fight; he landed and went straight to Freddie Roach's sweat pit gym in search of a future that he had no idea existed. It was harsh from the start and there were the first early and traumatic months in the wrong part of Hollywood and the continued forced separation from his family. He had to stay, he knew that: "I was there to save my boxing career." It worked and less than a year after the loss he won the first of his two world titles.

Amir Khan in training (Getty)

The switch to Virgil Hunter and his San Francisco Bay gym has continued Khan's American education and extended the exile from all loving home comforts. Khan is the ultimate fighter in a foreign land, desperate for recognition and fearless enough to accept fights against boxers like the great Mexican Saul Canelo Alvarez.

Khan, you see, has nothing to protect, his unbeaten record went against Prescott, he has won and lost world titles at two weights since that night and, more importantly, he has twice been inexplicably shunned by Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao. Khan is fighting for the massive retirement fund that the endless broken promises from Mayweather and Pacquiao denied him. He is also fighting to prove people wrong, which has never been a good enough reason.

On Saturday at the T-Mobile arena, a sparkling new glass monument, situated near the freeway and behind the spill-over car park for the New York, New York hotel and casino in Las Vegas, Khan fights Alvarez and is probably as much of an underdog as Johansson was in the Fifties.

Alvarez is the Mexican street fighter with the ginger hair and a professional career that started before he was shaving. He had fought 21 times by the time he was 18 and now, at just 25, he has lost just once in 48 fights. He is the betting favourite, the WBC middleweight champion and he is a perfect fit for the man that loses out in another man's fairy tale.

Canelo Alvarez (Getty)

Khan has gained eight pounds of bulk to complete his transition from Olympic lightweight in 2004 to potential middleweight champion of the world. Under the stiff scrutiny of Hunter, a genuine maverick in a game of oddballs, there has been subtle shifts in Khan's preparation for fights; Khan is now and only now - according to Hunter - starting to think.

"I like to feel the uncomfortable zone and that is why Virgil is good for me," said Khan. "I push myself hard and feel the pain everyday in the gym and that is what a lot of boxers forget." In Bolton and Manchester before the defeat to Prescott there was very little pain in Khan's life and if he stayed and trained here it would be the same right now. Actually, it would be far worse.

"I have too many distractions in England, too many people that I can't say 'No' to, and that is why the quiet life here works for me,"added Khan. He has roommates, not an entourage, with his dad, Shah, and brother, Haroon, his training, eating and living partners during months in camps. His life has been about extreme sacrifices and risks, which is why the Alvarez fight makes so much sense.

The other heavyweight Fury

There is another heavyweight Fury on the boxing scene, he is called Hughie and he is still only 21, he is 6.6 tall, weighs nearly 18-stone and is unbeaten in 20 fights. He sings less, swears less, but he has the same skills as his bigger and older cousin, Tyson.

Hughie Fury with his cousin Tyson (Getty)

On Saturday night at the Copperbox, near Stratford in East London, Fury stopped an American brawler called Big Fred Kassi on cuts after seven rounds. Kassi's last fight was a hard-fought defeat on points over ten rounds to Dominic Breazeale and Breazeale is now fighting Anthony Joshua for the IBF version of the heavyweight title in London in June. Now you know what Joshua means when he says: "I will take one Fury at a time."