Amir Khan is Not a Cultural Spokesman

The white towel could have been a symbol of the state of boxing itself. Floating into the ring barely half a minute into the featured bout, it said that here was yet another fight hyped to the heavens and ending in the farce of a no-contest. ITV's bosses, keen for the first fruit of their new deal to justify its screening at prime time on a Saturday night, must have been tearing their hair out.

When the referee chose to ignore the towel as it lay in the middle of the canvas, he seemed to be trying to hold at bay the humiliation of an entire sport. By the time he raised the winner's arm aloft, after 1min 49sec of the opening round, the fight was already long over.

On a night when boxing once again landed a punch on its own glass jaw, the only redeeming feature of Amir Khan's professional debut was Amir Khan himself. Khan, that is, without all the nonsense that surrounded him.

Unwittingly, he blew the gaff himself a couple of minutes after being acclaimed the winner over the dazed David Bailey - to whom the question "Who do you think you are?" must have taken on a new and unhappy significance. When ITV's interviewer thrust a microphone in front of him, Khan said something to the effect of not yet having enough experience to know whether he should have taken the fight more slowly or speeded it up. He'd have to talk to his sponsors, he said, and gave an uncertain laugh.

The nation fell in love with Amir Khan last August, when he boxed his way to an Olympic silver medal with an irresistible freshness and enthusiasm. A few months later, no one could quarrel with his decision to reverse a previous pledge to retain his amateur status long enough to have another tilt at Olympic gold in Beijing. By any standards he looked ready to begin his apprenticeship in the professional game, and his ambitions happened to coincide with ITV's desire to resume a relationship with the sport.

The worrying precedent is that of Audley Harrison's notorious £1m television deal, signed after the super- heavyweight gold medal had come the way of the British fighter in Sydney. Greg Dyke, then the BBC's director-general, gave his blessing to a scheme to rebuild the corporation's coverage of boxing, with Harrison at the pinnacle and the ABA championships as the base.

When Harrison's talent proved as flimsy as Dyke's commitment to the amateur boxers, the relationship foundered. After two or three fights the public grew tired of watching Harrison dispatch worthless opponents. Anyone who had done a brief stint as a bouncer in a bar in the Gulf of Mexico, it seemed, would be a fit opponent for Britain's putative world heavyweight champion.

There was an echo of this earlier on Saturday's bill, when Matt Skelton faced not Danny Williams, his scheduled opponent in a British heavyweight title fight, but Mark Krence, a Chesterfield man who had been woken that morning and offered the biggest purse of his life. Krence's stout effort in lasting seven rounds could do nothing to repair the damage to boxing's credibility inflicted by Williams's late withdrawal.

And whoever selected Khan's first professional opponent was running the risk of repeating the kind of error that undermined Harrison's career. Bailey arrived at the Bolton Arena with a record of four defeats in seven fights, suggesting neither great potential nor the sort of experience from which Khan could usefully learn, and his decision to fire all his weapons in the first 15 seconds was brave, but stupid.

Khan did what he had to do and got himself off the mark as a pro, but more worrying than the mismatch was the crude exploitation of his ethnic background. He is a young Muslim, he is a young Briton, and he does not see any conflict between the two, which makes him an instant symbol of a fully functioning multicultural Britain. There is no good reason, however, even at this particularly sensitive time, why an 18-year-old on his first day at work should be explicitly promoted as an example to the nation or expected to become a cultural spokesman.

Amir Khan is a terrific fighter, an intelligent young man and a very welcome addition to the landscape. But when Land of Hope and Glory blared out over the public address system as he entered the hall, it was impossible to suppress the thought that somebody is looking on his arrival less as a chance to soothe fears and ease tensions, than as just another marketing opportunity.