Amir Khan: ‘I’m more British than Ukip’

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/apr/12/amir-khan-more-british-than-ukip

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There are scenes of mild chaos at Gloves Community Gym in Bolton. Amir Khan has arrived at the appointed time, but he has forgotten various appointed things: namely his suit and the boxing kit needed for the photo shoot which, in a heavily scheduled day, is supposed to be taking place right now.

We’re in the office, which is crowded with a dozen people or more, including a film crew which has been shadowing him for months for a documentary, and a woman standing in the doorway says: “That’s so Amir! He’d lose his head if it wasn’t screwed on.” It turns out that she’s Khan’s older sister Tabinda and she works in the family business – the Amir Khan business and all things associated with being a two-time world champion – as does his father, his uncle and his best friend Saj. If you want to be surrounded by ego strokers and flatterers, you’d do well, I’d say, to not employ your sister. Because Tabinda, who’s naturally warm and chatty, keeps up a running commentary as Haroon, Khan’s younger brother – another promising boxer, and his smaller, slighter lookalike (super flyweight versus Khan’s welterweight) – is dispatched to get the suit.

“Mum used to do everything for him. He’s such a one,” says Tabinda, pointing out that he’s left his watch, a massive gold and diamond-encrusted number lying on the table. On cue, Falak Khan, their mother, hoves into view, spots the watch and stows it safely in the pocket of a jacket. “See! Look at Mum clearing up after him,” says Tabinda, shaking her head. “Always the same.”

They’re so affable and friendly, the Khans. His dad is the next to arrive, the ever-smiling Shah Khan, and then his youngest sister, Mariyah, who’s been dragooned into doing his make-up for the shoot, and while everything patently revolves around Amir – the walls of the boxing gym are covered with newspaper headlines and photos of him meeting the Queen and winning silver in the 2004 Olympics – he’s treated less like he’s the king of a pretty lucrative empire and an international sporting hero, and more like he’s a charming but somewhat unreliable family pet – one you don’t quite trust not to piss on the carpets or run off in the park.

“Where’s my watch?” he says, looking around when he arrives back from the photo shoot, and for a moment I, too, find myself in the business of organising him. “It’s in the pocket of your jacket,” I say. On the other hand, I learn more about him by seeing him in the midst of his family than I have from any number of newspaper cuttings. He may be footballer-rich and footballer-famous – more than footballer famous, in fact, since he left to fight in America – but I can see how he’s been kept from becoming footballertastic. He was born a Bolton boy and still is every inch a Bolton boy. He trains in America, but lives in Bolton. He recently married a sophisticated New York heiress, but promptly relocated her to Bolton. (“She seems to be getting used to it, poor girl!” says Tabinda. “It were a bit of a shock.”) The gym we meet in is a community facility that Khan paid for and built and where hundreds of local schoolkids pour through every week to train for £1 a session.

We meet in January, and Khan had hoped that by the time the interview came out it would be just before what he hoped would be his big fight: against the reigning world champion Floyd Mayweather. He proved he’s worthy by beating another contender, Devon Alexander, in December. But professional boxing has nothing to do with worthiness or even who might be best. It’s a sport governed by no organisation or body but by promoters, TV networks, profit, cash. World champions can simply choose who to fight. Mayweather has instead chosen Manny Pacquiao as an opponent. And there’s nothing Khan can do about it.

He shrugs when I raise it with him. “We’re prizefighters. That’s what we become. Boxing has one of the biggest purses in sport. And in the sporting field we probably make the most money. But it’s a bloodsport. You go in there to fight and to hurt someone, and obviously I think it has to pay good because if you’re doing something like that, taking blows to the head, you’re going to get hurt.”

Still, it’s obviously frustrating. Not least because while Khan still feels like he’s at the top of his form, he’s now 28 and he knows more than anyone that the longer a boxer stays in the game, the more likely he is to take a blow to the head that he won’t quite recover from.

“You’re always just one punch away from getting hurt. But look, if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. I think I’m going to walk out of this sport of boxing when I think it’s the right time. Boxing’s not going to retire me; I’ll retire from boxing. That’s where most people make mistakes. They normally stay in the game a bit too long.” But isn’t that the point, I say. I’ve been reading earlier interviews and you said: I’ll retire at 25, at 26, at 28… How’s that looking now? “You know your body knows you’ve got maybe another good three or four fights left in you. I’m more experienced now. I think rather than rush straight in. I think about every move. When I was younger I was pulling so many shots and overwhelming my opponents; now I’m beating them with skill.” But even some of the greatest names in the game didn’t know the right time to retire, did they? Look at Muhammad Ali. “True. But look, I’m going to let my body tell me when to call it a day. I’m not doing it for the money or nothing. Financially I’ve secured myself for a long, long time.”

A friend who knows about boxing tells me that he thinks Khan was “pushed out” of Britain. “If you look on YouTube or on different websites you’ll see there’s an awful lot of bile directed toward him. He’s always denied that racism was any part of it, but I saw him fight in Manchester and, you know, the boxing crowd is not like at a football match – it’s late, people are drunk, and there was a lot of very blatant racial abuse going on from certain sections of the crowd. He doesn’t engage in it, but boxing draws a very traditional working-class white-male following… and it can be quite ugly.”

Khan does deny it. “I’ll answer first why I went to America. And that’s because if you want to be a global star and one of the biggest names in boxing, you have to go to America. And since I’ve been in America, I’ve had the biggest fights. Globally, everyone knows who Amir Khan is. And look, some people after a drink say bad things. But I just push it off. It never gets me. Deep down I know I’ve got people who love me.”

But isn’t it a bit depressing, I ask. Especially with Ukip doing so well in places like Bolton and helping fuel a new rhetoric of intolerance. “To be honest with you, I’ve never really experienced it much here myself. I’ve got nothing but a lot of love here from a lot of people. But maybe it’s because I’m probably more British than Ukip are because I represented the country in the Olympic games. I also fight for the country and I’ve won medals and titles for the UK. So I’m more British than them. So maybe when they see me they recognise that.”

Maybe, maybe not. He certainly knows how to work hard. “I’ve always known that to have anything you’ve got to work hard at it,” he says. His father’s father, born in the Punjab, was in the army, but moved to Britain and found work in a cotton mill, and his father went on to build up his own business, first as a mechanic then as a scrapyard dealer. When I later talk to Shah, Khan’s father, I ask if he wished his parents had lived to see Amir’s success, and his regret is obvious. “I’m still emotional about it when I look back and think of the Olympic games. It would have meant so much for them to have seen what he’s achieved.”

It’s easy to see how his family has been so influential, but being Muslim has also been part of it. Khan tells me how going on Hajj is a way of leaving behind all the celebrity razzmatazz. “Everyone is the same. I’m a normal person just like everyone. We all wear the same clothing and we go there to do our pilgrimage and prayers and everything. It’s the opposite of being in Vegas and seeing my name and pictures everywhere.” And he doesn’t drink and he doesn’t smoke, “which is for religious reasons, but it’s always helped me with my sport because I’m always in shape and I don’t put weight on.”

In Khan’s case, his religion is not just a matter of personal belief – it’s also been a part of his public identity. His first fight as a professional boxer was in July 2005, just nine days after London’s 7/7 bombing. It wasn’t a good time to be a British Muslim. A British-born Muslim from a northern town, Amir Khan responded by stepping into the ring wearing Union Jack shorts with “Land of Hope and Glory” blaring from the speakers. In December he visited the school in Pakistan where more than 100 children were killed in an extremist attack. “People said it wasn’t safe to go, but kids are being killed and we wanted to show support. What sick people could do that? You could see the bullet holes in the floor and you could still see blood stains everywhere.”

He’s not a lone voice, but he’s an influential one. There’s an increasingly febrile debate around the issue of the jihadisation of young British Muslims, but there have been few people as prominent and as well-regarded as Khan – who comes from the sort of community that the British jihadis are coming from – who have spoken out. “People are brainwashing them. Kids don’t grow up thinking about going out and killing innocent people. It’s why I go to schools and tell them: ‘Look, you want to follow the right path. You want to represent your country in a good way. You want to build a name for yourself and your families.’ I stand up all the time and say this. Obviously innocent people shouldn’t be killed. Obviously this is wrong.”

Do you think more people from the British Muslim community need to be saying these things? “Yes. And it’s not happening. It’s a very sensitive thing to talk about. And it’s tough. I get questioned a lot, but I think we have to be brave about this. I try and stand up and say the right things and get the message out. What’s happening gives us all a bad name. It’s why it’s so important to stand up and be counted.”

Khan knows of nobody from Bolton who’s gone off to fight in Iraq or Syria and he shrugs when I ask him how it feels to be seen as something of a spokesman on issues that have nothing to do with the sport he loves. And while he’s as patriotic as they come and has been unequivocal about extremist Islam, he’s still been caught up in the backlash. He’d get pulled aside by immigration for hours at a time every time he went to America. Right up until he met Hillary Clinton at an event in Washington. “And I told her. I said: ‘Look, this is happening.’ And she said: ‘Leave it with me’, and since then I’ve never been pulled in.” And when his US visa was revoked at Heathrow, he got on the blower to David Cameron. “I had a fight in two days’ time and I had to get there, so I rang David Cameron and he said: ‘Look, leave it with me.’ And he sorted it out.”

We have to dash out the door to the official unveiling of his portrait at the Bolton Museum and we continue the interview in his car. One of his cars. Some sort of sporty Bentley number that he’s parked up outside Aldi. He tells me that he doesn’t feel the need to spend his cash on flash. “I’ve worked too hard for it,” he says, although I notice a few weeks later he’s in the papers standing next to his new £300,000 Lamborghini. He’s being eminently sensible with most of it, though, investing it in property including a vast wedding and banqueting hall that’s currently rising from the ground in Bolton. “One of the halls is going to hold 1,000 people, and then on the bottom floor there’s going to be restaurants and a café. It’ll employ up to 150 people. In my community, people like big weddings.”

You’re not kidding, I say. Didn’t you have 4,000 people at yours? “Yeah, and out of that I probably only knew about 1,000. No, not even. Maybe 500. But my mum was happy. It was the first big boy’s wedding in our family.”

So how did you persuade your wife to give up the delights of Manhattan for Bolton? “Oh come on! It had to be Bolton,” he says. “Come on! Everything’s in Bolton. I couldn’t not be here. It is my home. It is the centre of everything.”

Was it Bolton or bust? “Exactly. It was either Bolton or bust. She’s cool with it now. Or… you know, she’s got used to it. Especially now with the baby keeping her busy.”

When we get to the museum he’s spirited away, and various locals tell me how much he’s done for the community. There’s the gym and the Amir Khan Foundation, which builds orphanages around the world and a whole host of other charities he supports. His model is Muhammad Ali, he told me, not just for his boxing but “for the way he handled himself outside the ring and all the charity stuff”.

“The problem,” his uncle Taz says, is that he doesn’t know how to say no. “People are always coming up to him in restaurants and asking him to do stuff and he’s always saying yes. We have to say no for him.”

And then his father Shah tells me how he was the one who accidentally began it all. “Amir just had so much energy as a boy. He was so active and always messing around. The only reason I took him to the gym was to try and get him to spend some of that energy. I just wanted to tire him out. I never thought he’d get this far. He won every national title from the age of 12. He lost the first one when he was 11, and I think that was the making of him.”

Because it didn’t all go his way? “Exactly. I think that’s when he realised that to get to the top, he’d need to train hard and do everything right. I remember being with him when he was about 12 and he met Ricky Hatton and– I still think this sounds crazy, even in my head – he went up to Ricky and said: ‘Ricky, you watch out for me.’ This is a 12-year-old kid! ‘You watch out.’ He just had that confidence.”

It’s a fine line between confidence and delusion. But so far it’s paid off. Will he get the big career-defining fight he craves? Will he retire with another world title under his belt? Inshallah. It’s as God wills. Or, more likely, Floyd Mayweather.

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