By Ryan Burton
After last week's 12th round knockout of Jose Benavidez in the highest rated fight of the year, the clamor for a Terence Crawford-Errol Spence unification bout is bigger than it has ever been.
There are significant obstacles to making the fight with Spence's allegiance to Showtime and the PBC and Crawford's affiliation with ESPN and Top Rank being the biggest ones.
Another mega-fight that would have the same obstacles would be a Vasily Lomachenko-Mikey Garcia fight for undisputed at 135 pounds. If Lomachenko defeats Jose Pedraza on December 8th, he will hold both the WBA and WBO lightweight titles while Garcia is in possession of the WBC and IBF titles.
Arum says that he would like both fights to happen next year.
"As far as I am concerned do the best fights as soon as possible. Forget about marinating. The best fight at lightweight is Lomachenko and Garcia. If Lomachenko is successful against Pedraza do that fight right away," Arum stated.
"There is no reason to do any fights for Terence or for Spence unless they fight each other but again it takes two to tango. I really mean that. I am not playing games. They wanna make that fight, it will take probably 3 hours to do a Crawford-Spence fight."
Spence, who holds the IBF welterweight title, has expressed his displeasure on several occasions that the other welterweight champions won't face him. A Crawford-Spence clash would likely have to be a joint Showtime/ESPN pay-per-view venture between Premier Boxing Champions and Top Rank Inc. who recently signed Crawford to a multi-year extension.
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