Terence Crawford says he had mixed feelings in the immediate aftermath of his dominant victory over Errol Spence Jr.      

Omaha, Nebraska’s Crawford became the undisputed welterweight champion two months ago at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas with a ninth-round stoppage of Spence.    

In a recent interview, Crawford said he felt a range of emotions, from elation to relief, after his beatdown of Spence. The three-division titlist said he even felt “disappointed,” in part because of the amount of time it has taken for him to achieve the kind of acclaim that he imagined would have been granted to him earlier in his career.

Crawford (40-0, 31 KOs), who turns 36 in September, has long had to contend with criticism that he was not a truly elite fighter in the welterweight ranks. Boxing politics also prevented Crawford from securing meaningful fights.

“That’s what my feelings was,” Crawford told Joe Rogan. “A lot of people were like, ‘Man, you didn’t look too happy after you won. I didn’t see the excitement in you.’ I was like, man, I was happy. I was happy I had to prove myself to the world how great I knew I was. But at the same time, I was kinda disappointed at the same time that it took this long for me to get my recognition, for me to get a big marquee fight at this status, at 35 years old.

“I was chasing Manny Pacquiao for probably 5 years before [Spence]. I been champion for nine years, going on 10 years in March, so I’ve been doing this game for a long time, you know, I’ve been at the top since I beat [Yuriorkis] Gamboa (in 2014) and I been looking for all the biggest challenges there is. Some of them I’ve been able to capture and some of them went the other way. I’m just blessed to be the first man to be undisputed in the junior welterweight division and the first man to be undisputed in the welterweight division in the four-belt era, the first man to be undisputed in two weight divisions. It’s a blessing.

“You know, when you go in the back room and everybody want to see the excitement and I was just like, ‘I got that off my back.’ It was a sign of relief.”