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Saturday night marks the fourth title defense for the WBO Welterweight World Champion and one of the best pound-for-pound fighters in the game. Terence Crawford. But, bigger than the subplot of him fighting England’s Kell Brook in a 12-round title defense is the looming possibility that Crawford wants to get out of his deal. Top rank boxing.
It’s something we covered during the last preview of the Big Fight Weekend podcast with special guests Marquis Johns, senior writer for the site, and Abraham González from NewYorkFights.com,
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Gonzalez gave a glimpse of how Crawford and ESPN promoted him so heavily this week leading up to the main event. And that would be part of Crawford’s desire to end his deal, ASAP, with Top Rank.
“I understand ESPN is doing that… apparently they only have a few months left with Top Rank. So maybe they are ‘hitting that house’ to retain their services? “
Gonazlez continued with a theory he has about Crawford’s next moves,
“He would come up and fight (WBO Jr. middleweight champion Patrick) Teixeira, and then he would make the undisputed fight against (Jermell) Charlo in 2021.”
While Teixeira is a Matchroom Boxing fighter, Charlo is one who is controlled by Premier Boxing Champions. And that’s the same problem Crawford has had with a great welterweight showdown.
That includes undefeated Errol Spence, who will defend the WBC and IBF Unified versions of the championship against Danny Garcia in a Pay-per-View on December 5 in Arlington Texas. Too, Manny pacquiao who still has at least one fight remaining on his PBC contract and is looking to fight in the first quarter of 2021. The future Hall of Famer owns the WBA World Welterweight Championship that he beat Keith Thurman in July 2019.
As Crawford has found out the hard way over the course of the past three calendar years, he has no hope of facing Spence, Pacquiao, Thurman or even former WBC 147-pound champion Shawn Porter or any of the other former champions or the next welterweights that PBC has.
Instead, Crawford has been relegated to fighting players like Aamir Khan and Egidijus Kavalauskas and now, Brook. Even though Brook is a former IBF world champion, Spence beat him by TKO three years ago in England and this is certainly not a mega fight.
To follow Crawford’s angle of unhappiness, Atheltic Insider Mike Coppinger also wrote about the situation on Friday. And that Crawford’s attorney wrote to Top Rank about his displeasure at the lack of “quality opponents” during their deal.
Coppinger also revealed that the undefeated Crawford’s multi-year contract with the promotion apparently expires in October 2021. However, the Omaha, Nebraska native wants to leave long before then to hunt down one of the previous opponents.
With all that in the background, now let’s see if Crawford is focused on the business at hand tonight in Las Vegas and helps his leverage, at least in part, whether he leaves Top Rank or not.
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