Welterweight champion Terence Crawford thinks structural changes could be coming soon to the boxing business.
Omaha, Nebraska’s Crawford, who holds all four 147-pound titles, was asked in a recent interview to give his thoughts on the recent rift between Ryan Garcia and top brass at his promotional company, Golden Boy, namely founder Oscar De La Hoya and his partner Bernard Hopkins.
Crawford—no stranger to promotional battles, having had his own conflicts with his former promoter, Top Rank—was somewhat coy in his response but he hinted nonetheless that the usual way in which business is conducted in boxing needed to change.
“Well, you know, hey there’s a lot of things that I can say right now that I’m not gonna say,” Crawford told FightHype.com. “But there’s a change that needs to be made in the sport of boxing, and I think that change is coming soon.”
“There’s always that thing for us fighters to come together but it’s always when you turn around it’s ego, you know, when you got a lot of fighters that got big ego and pride, issues, it’s hard to talk to them about things of that nature,” Crawford continued. “Especially if we’re talking about change. That’s a big thing in boxing. That eliminates a lot of things, like the promoters, managers, things like that, and people not gonna like that. But when everything is put out in front of you, how can you go against it?”
Crawford’s apparent critique of promoters and managers is not new, having told De La Hoya himself a couple of months ago on social media that boxers needed a “seat at the table.”
De La Hoya insisted that fighters needed to focus on fighting, while letting their handlers take care of business, prompting a swift rebuke from Crawford.
“This is EXACTLY the point,” Crawford wrote in a post on X. “I say we need boxers at the table and @OscarDeLaHoya says sit down and shut up. U really think we better if yall keep running things. U don’t get it. We need to do things different, like other sports. We have the power and y’all can’t keep us from using it.”
Crawford made those comments in the wake of the news that Showtime was shutting down its entire sports department at the end of the year, thus capping its near four-decade involvement in boxing.
Sean Nam is the author of Murder on Federal Street: Tyrone Everett, the Black Mafia, and the Last Golden Age of Philadelphia Boxing.