Liam Harrison wanted to fight Floyd Mayweather, there is no doubt about that. But he was told that taking a boxing match with the legendary American could cause career ending damage to his knee.
Harrison was recovering from knee surgery when the offer came in. But he still wanted to go ahead and accept a boxing match with Mayweather because he thought it would be possible to fight as long as he wasn’t throwing kicks.
The Englishman even began training for the fight but it sound became apparent that his knee was not strong enough. He went into a bit more detail in an Instagram post:
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Insurmountable obstacles
The announcement that Mayweather would be boxing Harrison took everyone by surprise including, it seems, ONE Championship who have the Englishman tied down to an exclusive contract. So there were some potentially insurmountable obstacles towards making this fight.
The offer to face Mayweather came completely out of the blue and no-one was more surprised than Harrison,
“Mayweather’s interested in fighting you (and) this was like a couple of weeks before the fight and then the next minute I’m on Facetime with Mayweather’s manager and he’s like ‘right this is gonna happen’.”
Harrison was recovering from knee surgery at the time but wasn’t going to let a small detail like that get between him and a bout with the most famous fighter on the planet.
“It’s only boxing, just hands and there’s no kicking no twisting, should be alright.”
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Big question
Unfortunately it quickly became clear that he wasn’t even capable of training for the fight let alone compete against the best boxer of the century,
“Obviously I knew my leg were blitzed (but) I jumped into training and as soon as I started sparring and moving around the ring my leg just ballooned up.”
This prompted a frank conversation between Harrison and his surgeon,
“I said to my surgeon ‘am I going to be able to get through this?’ and he said ‘listen its up to you but you might cause irreversible damage, you might be walking with a limp for the rest of your life, you might need a knee replacement by 40. Is that gonna be worth it?’.”
Harrison decided that the answer to this question was ‘no’. At this stage he still hadn’t signed a contract to fight Mayweather despite the boxer announcing to his 28 million Instagram followers that the bout was happening.
So the boxing match between Harrison and Mayweather looks unlikely to ever happen. But it sounds like the Muay Thai fighter made a very sensible decision.
