Photos: Kell Brook, Errol Spence - Ripped and Ready For War!

By Keith Idec

The hard part, especially for Kell Brook, is over.

Brook and Errol Spence Jr. both made weight Friday afternoon in Sheffield, England, for their IBF welterweight title fight Saturday night at Bramall Lane.

The 31-year-old Brook weighed in at 146½ pounds on the British Boxing Board of Control scale at Sheffield City Hall, just under the welterweight limit. The 27-year-old Spence came in at 146¼ pounds.

Neither fighter can add more than 10 pounds over the welterweight limit (157 pounds) before the IBF’s second-day weigh-in Saturday morning.

Though they’re the same height (5-feet-9), Brook is the older fighter and has long had difficulty making welterweight. His promoter, Eddie Hearn, all but begged him to give up the IBF welterweight championship rather than making a mandatory defense against Spence, a strong southpaw from DeSoto, Texas.

Brook absolutely refused and demanded that Hearn make a deal with Tom Brown, the promoter who negotiated on behalf of Spence, who’s managed by Al Haymon. Hearn and others thought it would be particularly tough for Brook to make welterweight again after moving up two weight classes for his last fight.

Sheffield’s Brook weighed in at 159½ pounds for that middleweight championship bout, which resulted in the first defeat of his 12-year pro career, a fifth-round technical knockout loss to Kazakh knockout artist Gennady Golovkin (37-0, 33 KOs) on September 10 at O2 Arena in London. Brook arrived at the scale at 146½ pounds for his previous fight, a second-round stoppage of Kevin Bizier (25-3, 17 KOs) in March 2016 at Sheffield Arena.

Spence, despite his inexperience against championship-caliber opposition, is slightly more than a 2-1 favorite over Brook. The 2012 Olympian will fight for the first time since knocking out Italy’s Leonard Bundu (33-2-2, 12 KOs) in the sixth round of an IBF elimination match August 21 in Brooklyn, New York.

Brook will attempt to make the fourth defense of the IBF 147-pound championship he won when he edged Shawn Porter (27-2-1, 17 KOs) by majority decision in their August 2014 fight in Carson, California.

Showtime’s coverage of Brook-Spence is set to begin in the United States at 5:15 p.m. ET/2:15 p.m. PT. Sky Sports Box Office will televise their highly anticipated welterweight title fight as the main event of a pay-per-view broadcast in the United Kingdom (6 p.m. BST; £16.95 in HD).

Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.