Kell Brook announces retirement
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Former welterweight world titlist Kell Brook announced on Saturday that he is retiring from boxing after an 18-year career.
“My heart's no longer in it. I've got nothing left to prove," Brook told the British newspaper the Telegraph. “I had a long chat with my family. It is over for me. I'll never box again.
“It's a little emotional to be actually saying this out loud. My mum is relieved. I think everyone around me is pleased. Truth is, boxing is a very, very tough, dangerous sport, one in which you can be legally killed in the ring, and I've finished now with all my faculties intact.”
Brook (40-3, 28 KOs), 36, of England, is coming off a long-awaited showdown with rival Amir Khan, whom he knocked out in the sixth round of a one-sided fight on Feb. 19.
After the fight, he was unsure what he wanted to do next but knew there would be offers for future fights, including one against up-and-coming British welterweight Conor Benn.
But Brook has decided enough is enough.
“I'd just like to be remembered as a fighter who would go in with anyone, feared no one and who gave the fans what they wanted,” Brook said.
Brook, who turned pro in September 2004 and won the British welterweight title in 2008, finally got a mandatory world title shot in August 2014 against then-IBF 147-pound titlist Shawn Porter. Brook traveled to Carson, California, and won a majority decision to claim the title in an upset.
Brook made three successful defenses, all in England, against JoJo Dan, Frankie Gavin and Kevin Bizier before taking the opportunity to move to middleweight to challenge unified middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin in a big event at London’s O2 Arena.
Golovkin stopped him in the fifth round and broke his orbital bone. Eight months later, Brook returned to welterweight to defend his title against mandatory challenger Errol Spence Jr. before some 30,000 at Bramall Lame Football Ground in his hometown of Sheffield, but Spence was too much for him. He dropped Brook twice and broke his other orbit bone in an 11th-round knockout victory.
Brook would fight five more times, including three times at junior middleweight, and go 4-1. The one loss was the fight before the victory over Khan, when Brook traveled to Las Vegas to challenge WBO welterweight titlist Terence Crawford in November 2020 and got knocked out in the fourth round.
Fifteen months later came the fight with Khan.
“I needed the Khan fight,” Brook said to the Telegraph. “I needed to settle the grudge, the feud. There is no dark feeling left in me now. I think when you have been in the ring with someone, it passes, it leaves you.
Post-boxing, Brook said he was interested in training or managing fighters.
Photo: Boxxer
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Good for him, hopefully Khan does the same.
Always felt Brook have had an even better career if he'd moved up to Light Middleweight long before he did. He was a huge welterweight when he won the British title so i'd guess for a fair few years the level of weight cutting he was having to do to make the 147lbs limit purely for what he hoped would be better financial rewards was diminishing his performances. Its saying something that Brook's walk about weight he outweighed Golovkin considerably, at the 30 day before the fight Brook was 11lbs heavier than GGG and in the last weigh in was 0.5lbs heavier and entered the ring a heavier man so it gives an idea of the level of weight cutting he was doing.