If Terence Crawford is trying to keep his fight with Errol Spence Jr. alive, he is doing a poor job of it, according to Derek James.
James, the longtime trainer of WBC, WBA, IBF welterweight champion Spence, recently weighed in on the fallout of a proposed undisputed welterweight showdown between his charge and Crawford, the WBO titlist. Crawford opted to fight David Avanesyan instead, stopping the Russian inside six rounds a few weeks ago at CHI Health Center in Crawford’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska.
Crawford-Avanesyan was streamed on pay-per-view by BLK Prime, a Silicon Valley company that announced itself to boxing with that fight. According to Crawford, he was paid $10 million, a hefty sum given the caliber and profile of his opponent. It is not clear what kind of buys the fight garnered, but Crawford has historically not performed well on pay-per-view.
James feels it was a short-sighted move that only benefited Crawford, at the expense of his promoter, and did nothing to “build” a future fight with Spence.
“To be on this level and not fight on a true pay-per-view fight card and to not really understand the business aspect of it—I think that to build a fight is what makes the fight,” James told Brian Custer on The Last Stand Podcast. “So what happens when you see him take this other fight and not build the fight. He gets what he wants but the promoter, as a whole, don’t get what they want. You don’t put up millions of dollars to lose millions of dollars. I think that’s the part of life he truly didn’t understand as a fighter, not as a business man.
“If you see in his uneducated perspective of what he thought boxing is, he got the fight but he was the only winner, not the promoter.”
Crawford said talks with Spence fell through after Spence’s advisor, Premier Boxing Champions founder Al Haymon, refused to offer “transparency” on certain financial aspects. Otherwise, Crawford said he agreed to all other terms.
Referencing scuttlebutt suggesting that Crawford’s latest fight did not generate very many buys, James seemed to think that Crawford could not approach negotiations for a Spence fight with the same degree of leverage as before. James said Crawford has an inflated notion of his worth relative to Spence and their fight as a whole.
“At the same time, I think that if he were to go into negotiations now with those numbers, you have no leg to stand on … ‘Yesterday’s fight is not today’s fight,’ James said. “Yesterday was an assumption, today is a fact. You can’t come up in my face talking this or that, that’s what you’re doing. I think it was something unnecessary for him.
“You can go through life thinking you are something in particular, and that’s cool, because you believe it’s who you are for yourself, right? But when someone tells you, no, your [pay-per-view buys], whatever the number was, I don’t really know what they were … that’s who you are now. So you can’t talk about —no, no. I’mma reference who you are. You can’t hide behind the machine of ESPN and Bob Arum … He’s by himself and now he’s totally something different.”
When asked to gauge his optimism on the possibility of seeing Spence and Crawford fight in 2023, James offered a tepid response, while pointing the finger at Crawford.
“I don’t know,” James said. “It may not happen. I think that it may not happen because, remember, his perspective of who he is [different] than what the numbers say and those things are not going to add up. He shouldn’t think any less of himself. But in reality you have to understand what the market says, and the market says no."
Spence is expected to fight Keith Thurman next, sometime in the latter first half of 2023.
