An all-time great fighter, though one who has just come into his financial prime, announces his retirement, leaving, say, another $100 million on the table.
I know what you’re thinking.
Don’t.
Don’t doubt Terence Crawford. It’s what fueled him all these years. It’s what made him the undisputed champion at 140, 147 and 168 pounds. It’s what made him the greatest fighter on the planet (no disrespect to Oleksandr Usyk, for whom a case can also be made). And now, in violation of almost every boxing convention, it’s allowed him to retire on his own terms, undefeated at the very top of the game, coming off his signature win.
The only other guy I’ve known to do that — and stay retired — is the great Andre Ward, who left in 2017 after consecutive wins over the erstwhile light heavyweight boogeyman, Sergey Kovalev.
“What strikes me the most about where Terence is, the place that I was fortunate enough to get to — with your legacy, your faculties and your fortune intact — is that you’ve defeated the greatest opponent any fighter could face, an opponent that has defeated many of the greatest fighters ever to live,” Ward told me Tuesday night. “You have defeated the sport itself. You have defeated the doubters, injury, praise and criticism. You have overcome risk: that single punch that can change your legacy and your life. This is rare air. You’ve beaten boxing.”
Boxing is full of traps, starting with the fighter’s ego. The same ego that first made you great keeps you coming back as a diminished version of yourself. Beyond that, the game itself is all but rigged, favoring the bigger man against the smaller one, younger versus older, the so-called A-side fighter who generates the lion’s share of the revenue over everyone else. At 38 years old, Crawford, a guy who had spent most of his career south of 147 pounds, was none of those things when matched against Canelo Alvarez in September. Canelo wasn’t merely the undisputed 168-pound champion then, but also boxing’s most lucrative attraction. Yet Crawford’s historic victory was even more one-sided than the unanimous scorecards would have you believe.
And it all goes back to this double-sided notion of money and doubt. For a generation of fighters, some of them truly excellent, though not great, fighting Canelo had come to represent the score of a lifetime. For Crawford, however, Canelo became his “white whale,” an existential corrective for every doubter at every juncture of his career. And there were a lot.
“That’s the only fight I want,” Crawford told Turki Alalshikh, the chairman of the Saudi Arabian general entertainment authority, who bankrolled the Canelo fight.
At the time, Alalshikh was keener on matching Crawford with Jaron “Boots” Ennis or Vergil Ortiz Jr., both undefeated superstars at 154 pounds. Crawford wouldn’t hear of it, though.
“Boots is not a megafight,” he told me in September. “Vergil Ortiz is not a megafight. This is the tail end of my career. They’re going to say, ‘You were supposed to win.’ I want Canelo Alvarez.”
If you didn’t think he could beat Canelo then, maybe now you’ll think better. Crawford will stay retired — if only because the boxing odds are always on a comeback. Doubt him if you must, just remember when it comes to doubters, Crawford is undefeated. Before Canelo, there were those who thought he would never beat Errol Spence Jr., whose career he ended. There were those at his former promotional company, Top Rank, who, in fairness, signed him when no other big promoter would, came to think he would never be much of an attraction.
Crawford had doubters at every division, going back to the amateurs. Though in retrospect, you have to wonder why, given his amateur victory over a young fighter as gifted as Mikey Garcia. Crawford was doubted for being from Omaha, Nebraska, which was nowhere on the boxing map until he put it there.
Crawford was doubted by the local cops. By the kids on the corner. By some of his teachers. But mostly, and most famously, by his own mother, Miss Debra.
On the eve of his first title fight 11 years ago, Crawford found himself as an underdog a long way from home, facing a Scottish champion named Ricky Burns in Glasgow. Before her son left for Scotland, Miss Debra offered her usual prefight pep talk. “You ain’t s—,” she told her son. “Gonna get your ass kicked.”
“I knew it’s gonna stick in his head,” she told me in 2018. “And he’s gonna go over there and whup some ass.”
In fact, that’s what happened: a little-known fighter traveling continents to win a unanimous decision in the champion’s backyard. That’s how it started, his long, undefeated title run.
Looking back, though, I think differently of Miss Debra. Mike Tyson has a theory about great warriors, beginning with Alexander the Great, that they’re all mama’s boys. “That’s why Alexander kept pushing forward,” Tyson once said. “He didn’t want to have to go home and be dominated by his mother.”
By that standard, the Crawford matriarch is right up there with Olympus herself.
Thank you, Miss Debra.
Thank you, Terence.
It was a pleasure. It was challenging. It was an honor.