You’re Francis Ford Coppola. It’s 1972. The Godfather comes out, and you’ve forced the cinematic cognoscenti to reconsider all of their “Citizen Kane is the GOAT” takes that have been presented as consensus for the last three decades.

So what do you do? You go and direct another masterpiece released two years later that generates a lifetime of debate over whether The Godfather is even your best film.

As soon as referee Harvey Dock waved his arms, signaling the end of Terence Crawford’s nine-round annihilation of Errol Spence Jnr on a sweltering summer night in Las Vegas in 2023, my mind began racing in search of historic comps. I had a podcast to record in a few minutes, and I had to figure out whether I’d just witnessed the most complete performance — taking into account the level of opposition and the dominance of the destruction — I’d seen in my quarter-century covering boxing.

The conclusion reached on the short walk from T-Mobile Arena to my hotel room, before Kieran Mulvaney and I hit the record button: It was either this, or what Bernard Hopkins did to Felix Trinidad back in 2001.

In other words, at worst, the perfection achieved in Crawford’s performance was number two on my list.

It was that spectacular. It was that special.

And here we are, a mere two years and two months later, and “Crawford KO 9 Spence” may no longer be Bud’s finest hour.

Crawford went out two Saturdays ago and gave us Robert DeNiro as young Vito, he gave us Frank Pentangeli and Hyman Roth, he gave us “I know it was you, Fredo” and the kiss of death.

He beat Saul “Canelo” Alvarez by unanimous decision, and in so doing opened right back up what had seemed a closed discussion.

With his second jaw-dropping pugilistic work of art at the sport’s highest level — just two years after his first — Crawford left the boxing world to debate: What’s his best win?

This column is an unplanned sequel to the one I wrote a week before the Crawford-Alvarez fight, when I wondered what Canelo’s greatest win was because he didn’t quite have one that checked all the boxes.

Crawford presents the opposite dilemma: He now has two separate victories for the ages, each so magnificent that it’s difficult to choose between them. (In hindsight, I may have screwed up by kicking off this article with a The Godfather/The Godfather Part II analogy when Sophie’s Choice was also sitting there.)

Anyway, let’s try to figure this thing out.

There’s no question that, for pure dominance and destruction, for the aesthetics and emphatic excellence of the triumph, knocking Spence down three times and forcing a stoppage while losing just one round on each official scorecard beats going the distance with Alvarez (and, at least officially, needing to sweep the last two rounds to win the fight).

The Crawford-Alvarez fight was in no way controversial; I have yet to encounter an actual human who doesn’t believe Bud deserved the win. (Note to the tech lords: Maybe chill with your insistence on handing our jobs over to AI. It ain’t there yet.) Crawford’s outboxing of Canelo was brilliant, beautiful and somewhere between “totally decisive” and “just decisive enough.”

But Canelo was never knocked down or remotely close to getting knocked out, so, clear edge to the Spence win here.

The obvious counterpoint is to declare Alvarez a superior opponent to Spence. And in certain regards, that is absolutely a correct counterpoint to raise.

Canelo is a first-ballot Hall of Famer. He’s waltzing right into the museum in Canastota, unanimously or close to it, three years after his final fight, having held titles in four weight classes — lineal championships in two of them — and having sat atop most pound-for-pound lists for a year or two toward the end of his prime.

I suspect Spence will land in the IBHOF as well, but he’s not quite a sure thing. He beat Shawn Porter and Mikey Garcia (both on the Hall of Fame ballot already, though I highly doubt either gets in), as well as Danny Garcia (who will surely make the ballot too), and Kell Brook and Yordenis Ugas (who could maybe see their names on there someday). Former Olympian Spence, who faced every welterweight of consequence in his time except Manny Pacquiao and Keith Thurman, was the best 147-pounder of a good, solid era — at least until Crawford moved into his division.

Even if he never fights again — and so far, he has not — his career was outstanding and his abilities elite.

But the boxing history books will rank him several notches below Canelo Alvarez.

Notably, there’s a significant divide between how Spence was perceived prior to the Crawford fight and how he is perceived now.

It's easy to forget, but in terms of the betting odds, Spence was just about even-money with Crawford back in July of 2023. “The Truth” was top five, or thereabouts, on all pound-for-pound lists, and there were a fair few people picking him to defeat Crawford. That’s how highly regarded the Texas southpaw was.

But now that Bud has beaten him up and perhaps beaten all the fight out of him, people are attaching asterisks. There’s a school of thought that Spence was damaged goods as a result of his 2019 car accident. I’m not buying that. His 2022 stoppage of Ugas in his last fight prior to facing Crawford was maybe the best he’d ever looked at the championship level.

Still, the perceived value of dominating Spence has decreased in the past two years, largely because that beatdown was so complete as to imply Spence couldn’t have been all that great. It’s a catch-22: Offer proof that a previously unbeaten man is beatable, and beating him instantly seems less extraordinary.

For my money, Spence, 33 years old at the time of his loss to Crawford, was closer to his prime than Alvarez was at 35 last week.

But, again, the value of that factor is mitigated by the fact that prime Alvarez would be a healthy favorite to defeat prime Spence.

Crawford’s win over Alvarez also gets the edge over the Spence win in terms of historical significance. I can insist all I want that size “advantages” are overrated, but going up two divisions to dethrone the lineal, unified champ should not be diminished.

It was after Crawford beat Canelo that folks started mentioning his name in the same sentence as Floyd Mayweather’s and making the case that maybe Bud, not Floyd, is the best of this century, and that maybe Bud would have won head-to-head in a mythical matchup. Hardly anyone was reaching that far prior to Crawford-Alvarez. And that’s because the knockout of Spence, magnificent as it was, packed less history-shaking impact.

One more point of comparison to consider: Nobody saw Crawford’s destruction of Spence coming. A majority picked Bud to win, yes. But I was in Vegas that week, interviewing guest after guest on radio row, having casual conversations about the fight with other members of the media. And pretty much everyone, whether they favored Crawford or Spence, opined that it would be close and admitted that they were struggling with the pick.

Crawford-Alvarez, on the other hand, went exactly as many experts thought it would. Was it an upset, technically? Yes. But what we saw was squarely in the range of likely outcomes. That wasn’t the case for most people with what Crawford ultimately did against Spence. Relative to expectation at the time, Crawford KO 9 Spence was the more astounding performance.

This is a fun game to play with quite a few all-time great fighters.

What’s Mayweather’s greatest win: KO 10 Diego Corrales (the fight in which Floyd looked his best) or W 12 Pacquiao (his highest-profile victory)?

How about Julio Cesar Chavez Snr? Do you go with the comprehensive beatdown of Edwin Rosario or the cinematic drama of the Meldrick Taylor fight?

What’s the crowning win of George Foreman’s career? Is it claiming the heavyweight title the first time, as a young man, over Joe Frazier? Or is it the second time, as an old man, over Michael Moorer?

What do you like for Roy Jones? When he scored a near-shutout win in his prime over James Toney, or when he leapt up two weight classes to take a heavyweight belt from John Ruiz?

With Sugar Ray Leonard, it’s actually a compelling three-fight debate: the rally to stop an undefeated Tommy Hearns, the rematch revenge win over Roberto Duran, or the forever disputed, nearly unthinkable upset win over Marvin Hagler.

Crawford is in strong company, having two truly epic, bow-down-worthy victories to his name, both of which top anything to be found on the resumes of quite a few men who’ve gained induction into the Hall of Fame.

Having had a week and a half to think about it, I find myself leaning toward the Spence fight as Crawford’s greatest win. It is already struggling, however, to stand the test of time.

The Canelo win figures to age better, because future generations figure to have a reasonable appreciation of how great Alvarez was. His is a name that will resonate 10, 20, 50 years from now. Spence, even if he makes the Hall of Fame, will not appear on all-time lists or be revered for generations by his countrymen.

For me, it comes down to terminology: KO 9 Spence is Crawford’s greatest win, but W 12 Alvarez will be his defining victory.

You can’t really go wrong with either of them, though. Offer me the opportunity to gush at length about Crawford’s performance vs. Spence or his performance vs. Alvarez, and that’s an offer I can’t refuse.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.