Underdog Role Fueling Relentless Chris Algieri Ahead of Showdown with Amir Khan

Chris Algieri has no problem being the dark horse.

So much of being a successful underdog in this sport, where a single punch can build or shatter dreams, is being comfortable in the role.

You can't allow yourself to drown in the noise of perception and criticism. Algieri, who has huge amounts of experience as the guy who isn't supposed to win, feels that's where he has the biggest edge over Amir Khan in their Friday night match at the Barclays Center.

“What you see is what you get with me. The guy you see in the interviews, the guy you see in fights and the guy you see walking the streets is the same guy,” Algieri told Bleacher Report. “I've always seen myself on this level in my mind. In my mind, I've been a champion my whole life.

“It's just kind of the role I fall into. I've been in fights where I'm the underdog, obviously, and I've only got one loss [to Manny Pacquiao]. Khan has never been in a fight that he wasn't supposed to win, and he's got three losses.”

Does he think Khan, who has made chasing pound-for-pound king Floyd Mayweather Jr. into something of a full-time job these past two years, is overlooking him?

“It's possible. It's not the first time that he's done that in his career," Algieri said. "We've got a fight coming up next week, so he better be looking at that night.”

If you hit the rewind button on his career and roll the frame back to a little more than a year ago at this time, you'd find a fighter very few people believed could operate on this level.

Even Algieri, a Huntington, New York, native who looks more like a movie star than a prizefighter and holds a master's degree in nutritional science, wasn't sure he was on the right path.

“I wasn't making the moves that I wanted to make. I wasn't happy that I wasn't getting prime-time exposure and getting out to a national audience,” he said. “I was fighting in my hometown on dark cards, which is non-TV. So for me, it was beginning to make less and less sense because I didn't feel like I was moving anywhere.”

Algieri's big break came when he took down Emmanuel Taylor in the main event of an ESPN Friday Night Fights card in February 2014 at the Paramount Theatre in Huntington.

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That win led him down the path to a showdown against feared Russian slugger Ruslan Provodnikov for the WBO Junior Welterweight Championship at Barclays last June.

He walked into that arena as a virtual unknown outside of New York boxing circles, and it appeared in the very first round that he would return to relative anonymity and prove all the critics, who said he just didn't belong, right.

Algieri went down twice inside the first three minutes and saw his right eye swell grotesquely shut from Provodnikov's vicious power hooks.

The mental willpower it took to fight through that adversity and outbox the Siberian Rocky with one eye over the next 11 rounds is a testament to Algieri's indomitable will to compete and win.

His upset victory in Brooklyn stole Provodnikov's spot opposite Filipino icon Pacquiao in a pay-per-view fight in Macau later in the year.

Everything about that fight was a disaster.

Pac-Man dropped Algieri six times before winning a unanimous decision by scorecards that were almost too wide to believe.

It was the one time in his professional career that the odds proved too great and the experience gap too much, and it provided lessons that Algieri, admittedly his own worst critic, will carry with him for the rest of his career.

“I don't want to say that I'm ashamed of it, but it's something that bothers me, how that fight turned out. There were a lot of firsts,” he said. “It was new for me and my team. We didn't have the experience at that level, and it showed.

“It was an experience, and we learned quite a bit. And I think going forward for my career, it's only going to make me a better fighter.”

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One major change in Algieri's camp this time around is the shift from Tim Lane, who looked totally out of his depth as head trainer for the Pacquiao fight, to veteran former multiweight world champion John David Jackson.

Jackson is the former junior middleweight and middleweight world champion who has helped guide Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev to the top of the light-heavyweight heap.

“It was motivated by realizing we needed that experience on the team," Algieri said about the switch. "When you have a guy like John David Jackson telling you that you did something right, or that looked good or do this instead of that, you don't second guess it. You have that confidence of knowing it's the right move.

“John is a great teacher but also a real student of the game. He does a lot of homework. On the first day, he was able to make assessments and see certain things about my style that I hadn't shown yet that he wanted to develop.”

Algieri said Jackson has helped him figure out better ways of utilizing his athleticism in the ring and sit down on his punches to produce more power.

But the biggest problem is going to be finding ways to neutralize Khan's speed, which easily ranks among the best—probably the best—in all of boxing.

It's that factor, more than any other, that makes Algieri once again the supreme underdog heading into the ring Friday night.

So what can he do to trouble Khan?

“I have great endurance and great defense. You make the guy miss, and you push the action. Khan's a sprinter, and I'm an endurance guy,” he said.

“The problem is a championship fight is not a sprint; it's a 12-round fight. You have someone like me who has the endurance and can make him miss, and it makes it a very interesting fight.”

It's one thing to be comfortable as the underdog—that's half the battle—but what you can do physically ultimately makes up the other half and decides fights.

Khan is supposed to win.

Algieri is supposed to lose.

That's nothing new for the underdog, and you wonder if he'd have it any other way at this point.

You can follow Kevin McRae on Twitter @McRaeBoxing. All quotes were obtained from a one-on-one interview.