By Keith Idec
The obligatory multimillion-dollar question was posed to Terence Crawford yet again after another impressive victory Saturday night.
Crawford has wanted to fight Manny Pacquiao for more than a year, but reiterated to HBO’s Max Kellerman that landing the Pacquiao fight remains out of his hands.
“That’s up to Bob Arum, my managers and my coaches,” Crawford told Kellerman in the ring after stopping John Molina Jr. in the eighth round in his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. “Of course I would love to fight Pacquiao, but it’s a business.”
Pacquiao (59-6-2, 38 KOs) hopes Floyd Mayweather Jr. (49-0, 26 KOs) will come out of retirement for a rematch. If that doesn’t happen, the Filipino superstar will start seeking another opponent for a spring pay-per-view fight sometime early in 2017.
If not Pacquiao, Kellerman asked, then who would Crawford want to fight next?
“Well, right now, anybody with a title,” Crawford replied. “Ricky Burns or the newly crowned IBF champion [Julius Indogo]. I want them belts. If I can’t get Pacquiao, I want them.”
The 29-year-old Crawford (30-0, 21 KOs), clearly one of the top pound-for-pound boxers in the world, defeated Scotland’s Burns (41-5-1, 14 KOs) by unanimous decision in Glasgow to win the WBO world lightweight title in March 2014. Burns, 33, since has won the WBA world super lightweight title, thus a rematch would represent a championship unification fight for Crawford, who owns the WBC and WBO 140-pound crowns.
Facing Indogo or Burns wouldn’t be high-profile fights for Crawford, which prompted Kellerman to ask Crawford about moving up to welterweight to fight Errol Spence Jr.
“He at 147, I’m at 140, and he may be moving up,” Crawford said. “But sure, that’d be a great fight.”
The powerful Spence (21-0, 18 KOs), of DeSoto, Texas, is the mandatory challenger for IBF welterweight champion Kell Brook. The IBF granted England’s Brook (36-1, 25 KOs) a medical extension to make his mandatory defense because he suffered a fractured eye socket during his fifth-round TKO loss to Gennady Golovkin (36-0, 33 KOs) on September 10 in London.
Brook has until late February to decide whether he wants to make his mandatory defense against Spence. He also could give up that title and move up to 154 pounds or 160 pounds.
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
