But now even she felt she had to fly out to join Amir’s father uncles and

But now even she felt she had to fly out to join Amir’s father, uncles and cousins at the ringside. The club has 2,300 of the town’s youths through its doors in any given week and tonight as many of them as the fire regulations will allow will cram inside to watch and cheer.
For the Olympic hero on the screen, Amir Khan ­ who has already won a bronze medal and will tonight go for silver ­ first laced up a pair of boxing gloves in the club’s gym after being sent there by his distracted father as a hyperactive eight-year-old. The 17-year-old contender for gold, who has been described as the most exciting British boxer for decades and even tipped as a future world champion, is a Bolton boy.This week his mother, Falak Amir, resplendent in a peacock blue sari, picked her way bewilderedly through the crowds at Manchester Airport to catch the plane to Athens to watch the fight in person Until now, she had watched only on the television. It is to throw up a talent, when everything seems to have turned to dust, of the ages, a man to lift up the sport and carry it to still another new horizon.This is a huge burden to place on the shoulders of Britain’s only fighter here, one whose own local council in a burst of nanny statehood decided to ban the oldest sport of all from public buildings But the brilliant boy can hardly complain It is he who has invaded our senses.

Bolton Lads and Girls Club will be packed tonight when they set up a giant screen to watch the boxing, live from the Olympics in Athens. It is he who has reminded us of men like Ali and Leonard.In return, we can only pray that somewhere along the road he doesn’t have to pay the price of so many of the great boxing Olympians.. It is a touch of beautiful redemption, a reminder of pugilism’s most enduring quality. He’s a lovely kid and in the ring he’s just awesome.”Certainly around his own weight class, Khan at 17 is occupying the terrain of potentially the best man since the Americans Howard Davis (1976), Pernell Whitaker (1984) and De La Hoya.

In the ‘76 vintage there was also the superb Leonard at light-welterweight and the Spinks brothers, Michael and Leon, who won middleweight and light-heavyweight golds before going on to claim the world heavyweight title.Evander Holyfield didn’t win gold as a light heavyweight in Los Angeles ­ he was disqualified, outrageously ­ but he announced the dawn of a great professional career.Here, Amir Khan is, partly because of the circumstances of professional boxing’s desperate decline as a front line sport, offering something more. “But I believe amateur fighters at the highest level are tougher than many pros these days, and whatever we think of legendary fighters it doesn’t mean we don’t have to give credit to Amir Khan. It is an age when unbreakable patience is perhaps not your most consistent asset.Yesterday the trainer attempted to define the extent of Khan’s talent. “Obviously Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard are two of the great talents to emerge from the Olympics, and you don’t casually make comparison with such men,” Edwards said. He repeatedly insists that these Olympics are simply a bonus run and that professional fighting is indeed something beyond his ambition until Beijing But he is 17 years old. Patterson was thought to be phenomenal but after losing crushingly to Sonny Liston he was insulted by that famous pugilist Frank Sinatra and took to wearing a false beard.Steve McCrory, the slight younger brother of professional world welterweight Milton, won flyweight gold in Los Angeles in 1984, but he was dead at 37, having pawned his medal and abused illegal drugs for many years.The underpinning of his family life, and his own refreshingly uncomplicated nature, provide strong re-assurance that such perils will not threaten Khan. He also said, when asked to join the US Army: “I got no argument with them Viet Cong.”In fact the casualty rate of gold-winning Olympic boxers is huge.

Few of them carry their lustre successfully through a professional career. America is the greatest country in the world and as far as places I can’t eat goes, I got a lot of places I can eat ­ more places I can than I can’t.” Yet soon enough Ali, who had his father’s wood-framed house decorated with American flags, was fighting with a motorcycle gang which sided with the racist restaurant owner who ejected the Olympic champion and a friend. When, as an 18-year-old, he won the Olympic light-heavyweight crown, he was asked by a Soviet journalist how he felt about the fact that men of his colour were not allowed to eat in certain restaurants back home in Louisville, Kentucky.”Russian,” said the young Cassius, “we got qualified men working on that problem We got the biggest and the prettiest cars We got all the food we can eat. Ten minutes later we were beating the hell out of each other.” They died, just days apart, 63 years later.Khan left his home in Bolton a boy and, at least in the eyes of the world if not his mother who flew into Athens this week, he will return a man Yet of course there is still so much growing to do Clay-Ali was required to do his in a particular hurry.