Terence Crawford wants to fight his welterweight counterparts at Premier Boxing Champions. The fact he can’t, he said, “It’s frustrating.”
Crawford (35-0, 26 knockouts) is scheduled to defend his 147-pound belt against mandatory challenger Egidijus Kavaliauskas (21-0-1, 17 KOs) on Dec. 14 in New York City. He’d rather be fighting Errol Spence, Shawn Porter, Manny Pacquiao or Keith Thurman, all of whom are managed by PBC.
The problem is the fighters’ affiliations. Crawford is promoted by Top Rank, whose fights are televised on ESPN. PBC has a deal with Fox and Showtime. And cross-platform agreements are hard to reach, especially when one side (PBC) has all the fighters it needs to make good matchups.
Crawford expressed his feelings in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
“It’s frustrating but I look at it as a business move by them not to fight me,” said Crawford, referring to the inability to make these fights. “I’m not going to knock them or be a hater, but I know where I stand and I know the game they’re playing and there’s nothing I can do about it.
“I just have to focus on what I can do and keep making a living and keeping my name up there as the best pound-for-pound fighter.”
Crawford seems particularly pessimistic about a possible matchup with Spence, his greatest rival for welterweight supremacy. Spence, recovering from injuries suffered in a car accident, is expected to fight next year.
“I don’t know if that fight will ever happen,” he said. “That’s not something I can decide. It takes two people to fight, and it takes two companies to sit down and figure it out and decide what network we’re going to fight on, where we’re going to fight, what the purses are going to be. It’s not as easy as people think it is, but it could be easy if we finally sat down at the same table and made it happen.”
He went on: “I’m willing to fight all those guys, but it’s not up to me to decide if I’m going to fight them or if I’m not going to fight them. I’m open to fighting all those guys. I’ve been saying that from Day 1. Nothing has changed. I’m the best fighter in the division and I’m always willing to prove it.”
“… Bob is willing to make any fight happen,” Crawford said. “At the end of the day, it’s not up to Bob. It’s up to me. The fighters are the ones that fight, and without us, there’s no promotion. So if a fighter really wants a fight to happen, he can make it happen. You can tell them, ‘Listen, this is the fight I want and I’m not fighting until I get that fight.’ It’s simple. At the end of the day, they work for us. If we don’t fight, nobody is going to get paid, so they have to make the fights that the fighters want.”
Crawford, 32, told The Times that he wants to accomplish as much as possible before he retires in three to four years.
“I still want to be the undisputed welterweight champion of the world,” he said, “and I believe I’ll be the first to be undisputed in two divisions, back-to-back. I just want to leave a mark on the sport of boxing so people talk about me like they talk about the other great champions before me. That’s my goal before I retire.”