This much everyone can agree on.
When WBO welterweight titlist Terence Crawford (37-0, 28 KO) defends this Saturday against former IBF and WBC titlist Shawn Porter (31-3-1, 27 KO) on ESPN+ pay-per-view (7 PM EST), it will be the best opponent Crawford has faced since moving to welterweight in 2018.
Crawford leaves plenty to debate outside that.
A lineal champion at lightweight and Jr. welterweight, with a unification of all the major sanctioning body belts in the latter, Crawford has been a staple of pound-for-pound lists for the better part of seven years. Against foes ranked in the top ten by TBRB and/or The Ring when Crawford defeated them, Crawford is 11-0 with 8 knockouts.
The last of those 11, Egidijus Kavaliauskas, was almost two years ago. Only two of the 11 have come at welterweight while other welterweights like Errol Spence, Porter, Manny Pacquiao, Keith Thurman, Danny Garcia, Yordenis Ugas have engaged in a bit of a round robin.
Crawford-Porter will bridge the divide between a Crawford who has competed exclusively for several years under Top Rank/ESPN banner and a Porter who is affiliated with PBC broadcasts. For many fans, a win would begin to answer the biggest argument about Crawford’s place in the sport.
It boils down to one word: resume.
Despite the accolades, despite the number of solid contenders on his ledger, Crawford has missed some big names so far. The dream fight for many hardcore fans the last few years has been Crawford-Spence. It hasn’t happened. Manny Pacquiao didn’t happen when Pacquiao was fighting for Top Rank or after.
Big names matter.
So does timing and timing may have played as big a factor in what some see missing from Crawford’s resume. Timing as it relates to a resume can be fascinating to dig into. It’s particularly the case with Crawford.
Three wins jump out when considering how timing has played into Crawford’s career: Viktor Postol, John Molina Jr., and Felix Diaz.
What if those three names were instead Lucas Matthysse, Ruslan Provodnikov, and Lamont Peterson?
How much different would Crawford’s resume be to skeptics with the latter three names instead of the men Crawford ended up with?
It’s worth remembering the context. Postol faced Crawford immediately off a knockout win of Matthysse. Molina faced Crawford right after upsetting Provodnikov. Diaz won two fights after a narrow, debatable loss to Peterson prior to seeing Crawford.
Crawford dominated all three of them, stopping Molina and Diaz in fights where it was hard to find a losing frame. Those who aren’t skeptical about the resume of Crawford look at another element that can feed perceptions: style points. Crawford accumulated those in all three fights.
It feels like only Postol is regularly brought up as a real quality win.
Postol won no more than 2-3 rounds against Crawford but has since gone on to give Josh Taylor and Jose Ramirez hell. He’s still one of the best Jr. welterweights in the world. The other two faded after their losses to Crawford. How they wound up in the ring with the Nebraska native is easily forgotten.
Even Postol never made the sort of impression, or built the sort of fan base at least with US fans, Matthysse did. Impressions help build names and there is little doubt that a Crawford-Matthysse fight would have been a bigger deal than Crawford-Postol despite Crawford-Postol being a unification fight at a time when they were the consensus top two in the class.
There is no guarantee we would have seen Crawford-Provodnikov or Crawford-Peterson under any circumstance. Still, is there any doubt either of those matches would have lit the marquee brighter than Molina and Diaz did or would be seen as stronger wins today?
Crawford fought the guys who won or, in the case of Diaz, had a case for it. Fair or unfair, that doesn’t always get credit. Heavyweight Evander Holyfield faced a similar problem in the early 1990s.
There was a time, easily forgotten, when Holyfield had a lot of naysayers about him at heavyweight after wiping out the cruiserweight ranks. Holyfield beat Buster Douglas after Douglas beat Tyson, but he didn’t beat Tyson. Name veterans were competitive with Holyfield and that was seen as a mark against him as well. Full context wasn’t in yet.
He beat George Foreman a few years before Foreman regained the heavyweight title and Larry Holmes months after Holmes upset an undefeated Ray Mercer and years before Holmes nearly upset Oliver McCall for a WBC belt. Bert Cooper gave Holyfield hell. It raised skepticism about Holyfield’s tenure at heavyweight that never quite went away even after avenging his first loss to Riddick Bowe. To satisfy the masses, Holyfield had to upset Mike Tyson in 1996 to change the narrative for good.
In hindsight, all those wins look good now but the timing of the fights in real time created a more mixed reaction. With Holyfield we have something we don’t have yet with Crawford. With Crawford, we don’t have the finished picture to examine. A resume isn’t really a resume until it’s all in the books.
There is no denying the welterweight run of Crawford has been less than it could have been. Saturday he has a chance to turn that ship in the right direction, perhaps even finally in the direction of Spence. Already 34, Crawford won’t have forever to polish his resume for posterity but this is one case where timing could be working in his favor.
Cliff Rold is the Managing Editor of BoxingScene, a founding member of the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board, a member of the International Boxing Research Organization, and a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America.
