Errol Spence Jr. doesn’t feel that the few times Terence Crawford has been buzzed in the ring should be counted against him.

What counts for the unified welterweight champion from Desoto, Texas, is that Crawford responded to those moments of seeming vulnerability with greater aggression.

After years of anticipation, Crawford, the WBO welterweight titlist, and Spence, the WBA, WBC, and IBF champion, will finally get in the ring July 29 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas for the undisputed 147-pound championship.

Their fight announcement was followed by a two-city (Los Angeles, then New York City) press tour, with the fighters alternating between trashtalking and exchanging pleasantries.

Of the latter, Spence brought up Crawford’s oft-mentioned lightweight title fight with Yuriorkis Gamboa in 2014, in which Crawford was rocked midway through the fight. That instance has long been considered by some critics as a mark against Crawford—but Spence made it clear he does not share that opinion, saying he does not “see any fault in that.”

Crawford, of course, would go on to violently stop Gamboa in the ninth round, in a fight that catapulted him into the imagination of the prizefighting public.

“Even [against] Gamboa, he showed a lot of determination, just because you see when a fighter gets hurt you see how they react,” Spence told Luke Campbell and Brian Campbell of Morning Kombat. "He reacted in a courageous way, so you know, I don’t see any fault in that.

“You get fighters who get hurt and they get timid or they always jumping or they more scared and not as active as they used to be but with him, he gets meaner when he gets hurt.”

Although Spence did not mention it, Crawford also met some turbulence in the ring when he fought Egidijus Kavaliauskas in 2019 in a 12-round welterweight title bout at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Crawford ate a hard right in the early going and had to hold onto the Lithuanian. Crawford, however, would roar back to stop Kavaliauskas in the ninth round.

Sean Nam is the author of Murder on Federal Street: Tyrone Everett, the Black Mafia, and the Last Golden Age of Philadelphia Boxing.