Last December, during an ESPN/Top Rank broadcast, analyst Tim Bradley fired a broadside toward the elite welterweights aligned with rival outfit Premier Boxing Champions: Stop ducking Top Rank fighter Terence Crawford.
Bradley believes that Crawford can’t land a significant fight because top PBC fighters are avoiding him. That group includes Errol Spence Jr., Keith Thurman and Danny Garcia. Of course, one could accuse Bradley, once a Top Rank fighter, of simply supporting company interests, given both he and Crawford receive paychecks from ESPN.
But it doesn’t appear to be an entirely partisan opinion.
On Friday, Shawn Porter, a top PBC welterweight and Fox analyst, was asked whether he had a chance to speak to Bradley about his comments given that both were on the commentating team for Saturday’s Deontay Wilder-Tyson Fury card.
Porter’s response? He smiled and said “no,” that he had no such plans. In fact, he agreed wholeheartedly with Bradley. But he wanted to make one thing clear: Bradley wasn’t talking about him.
“When Tim called out the PBC stable, he knew who he was talking about and he knew who he wasn’t talking about,” Porter told FightHubTV. “He wasn’t talking about Shawn Porter.
“Tim knows. We’re from the same place. We do whatever it takes, whenever it takes. He knows that about me. He knows that I’m a fighter and that I’ll fight everybody whenever the time is right.”
Why is Porter so confident that Bradley wasn’t talking about him? The proof is on his list of opponents: virtually all of the top welterweight contenders and titleholders of the past half decade can be found there.
Asked whether he felt that Bradley had a legitimate case, Porter replied, “Absolutely, absolutely.”
Then Porter doubled down.
“Even within PBC there’s fighters avoiding fighters within PBC, OK?” he said. “Guys are not fighting with their hearts, they’re fighting with their brains, and what I mean by that is that they’re trying to figure out how much money they can make and who’s the easiest one out there for me to take on.
“And that’s not fair to you guys (the fans). We’re getting to a point now where you can’t duck anybody, even on the PBC side.”
There’s no ducking with the 32-year-old Porter, who doesn’t plan to change his pattern of taking on the top contenders anytime soon.
“You just saw me get it on with Errol Spence and you’ll see me get it on with somebody else big,” Porter continued. “If it isn’t Terence Crawford, it’ll be somebody else on the PBC side. But I’m not here to fight a No. 6 guy, a No. 10 guy. That’s why you haven’t seen me announce who I’m going to fight, because No. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 won’t fight me.”
So who’s next? Porter ruled out Garcia as a possibility because he “fights almost once a year. He’ll probably get back in the ring in December. I don’t have time for that. June is the latest. I’m gonna force somebody to fight me by June. … By the time you see me in the ring, Showtime Shawn Porter will be mad.”
As for a potential fight with Crawford, Porter says only time will tell.
“I haven’t been able to catch up with Terence Crawford yet,” he said. “We’ve been texting. I know he’s here (at the Wilder-Fury fight) today. We’ll catch up. And you guys will find out something after that.
“But don’t ever say Shawn Porter is ducking anyone, don’t say Shawn Porter is ducking Terence Crawford, and don’t dare say Terence Crawford is ducking Shawn Porter. Until we talk, until we have a conversation that we agreed upon, we’re not going to say nothing about one another … because we owe that respect to one another.”