By Chris Williams: WBC/WBO light welterweight champion Terence Crawford (29-0, 20 KOs) appears to be finished for 2016, according to his manager Cameron Dunkin. There are no dates for the 29-year-old Crawford to fight on HBO for the remainder of 2016. With HBO have budget issues, the top fighters are competing for a limited number of spots.
The highly popular fighters like Gennady “GGG” Golovkin are getting dates, while the other fighters have to make do. Unless Crawford’s promoters at Top Rank can stick him on another pay-per-view card like they did last July in matching him against WBC 140lb champion Viktor Postol, it looks like Crawford may not be fighting until next year.
Crawford was hoping to fight three times in 2016, but instead he’ll have to be satisfied with his two fights against Postol and Henry Lundy.
Dunkin said this to RingTV.com about Crawford’s fight schedule:
“We all want him to be fighting three times a year and wouldn’t mind him fighting four times. The more he’s out there the more exposure he’s going to get and it will turn him into a name. He comes off a great win against Postol and all of a sudden he’s off for six or seven months. It’s not good.”
You can’t really say that Crawford’s fight against Postol was a “great” one. Dunkin may think it’s great, but the fight was boring to watch for a lot of boxing fans. Crawford fought defensively for most of the fight, and then chose to coast after building a lead. Instead of shooting for a knockout in the later rounds, Crawford got on his bike, stuck his tongue out at Postol, and moved nonstop in the 12th. It was not a star-building performance from Crawford.
When you’re competing with a highly popular fighter like middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin for a limited amount of dates on HBO, the last thing you want to do is get on your bike and play it safe against your opponent while sticking your tongue out. Boxing fans want to see the most exciting fights. They can see fighters running around trying to avoid contact on free television. When you’re talking about fights on HBO pay-per-view, you’ve got to entertain.
Crawford failed in a huge way to entertain in his fight against Postol. Golovkin is far more interesting to watch than what we saw from Crawford against Postol. Dunkin needs to say it straight about what the fans saw of Crawford’s performance against Postol. It was not a good fight. With it being on HBO PPV, even fewer fans saw the Crawford-Postol fight. It might have been a good thing for Crawford, because that the type of performance that might have hurt his popularity rather than increased it. If Crawford wants to become a big star in boxing and get more dates on HBO, I think he needs to dramatically change his minimalist style of fighting by becoming more aggressive and willing to mix it up.
Crawford needs to make the following moves to become a more exciting fighter:
– Stop moving completely and become totally stationary.
– Throw more punches. Stop looking to counter. Initiate!
– Dump his counter punching style to become a come forward type of fighter.
– Quit focusing on trying not to get hit all the time. Crawford needs to be willing to take shots in order to deliver his own punches.
Crawford is in the same boat that Golovkin is in needing to pay more to his opponents to get the bigger names to fight him. This means that if Crawford wants the guys like Adrien Broner, Danny Garcia, Lamont Peterson, Keith Thurman and Errol Spence Jr., then he needs to be prepared to take the small money to get those fights. It would be a trade-off. Crawford could take the small money now to try and become a bigger star in the future if he can beat those fighters. Unfortunately, I don’t think Crawford can beat Spence, Thurman or Shawn Porter. I do think he can beat Garcia and Broner, but that’s not saying much.
“You can’t pay them more than Terence,” Dunkin said about the bigger names. “You can’t pay the two together. Where are you going to come up with three or four million dollars? You’re not. These guys are like, ‘Man, I want to make $4 million,’ you know (Adrien) Broner.”
Of course, you can’t pay two big names at once in a fight against Crawford, but that doesn’t mean that he can’t take the really small money to get those fights.
If Crawford is confident in himself, then he shouldn’t mind getting the small money to get a fight against Broner, Garcia, Thurman, Spence or Amir Khan. I don’t know that Crawford’s promoter Bob Arum of Top Rank can get any of those fights in this life time, but he can at least try by offering them the much bigger money so that he can get one of them. What Crawford has working against him is a couple of things.
Arum doesn’t work with Al Haymon too often, and he’s the guy with most of the top names at 140 and 147 right now. Crawford also has his fighting style working against him as well. He’s a counter puncher who changes to southpaw frequently. He’s a mover/runner. It’s not exactly attractive for fighters to face runners, counter punchers and fighters that switch southpaw as much as Crawford does.
If I’m Crawford, I’d lose the southpaw bit, and stop running, stop counter punching, and stop focusing on my defense all the time. I would become a slugger like Tim Bradley and Golovkin, because the boxing fans want to see action. The only reason Floyd Mayweather Jr. was able to get away with being a counter puncher, mover and defensive artist was because he has such fast hands. Boxing fans liked to see Mayweather fight because he was able to pick his opponents off with blindingly fast shots. Crawford doesn’t have that kind of hand speed and he never will. Crawford has good hand speed, but not great hand speed.