By Brendan Taylor: On July 23rd, Terence Crawford (28-0, 20 KO’s) will face the toughest test of his career as he takes on Viktor Postol (28-0, 12 KO’s) in a battle for 140-pound supremacy. When you watch Terence Crawford fight at first glance you see everything you’d want in a top level fighter. He’s got fundamentals, an entertaining style and he’s got a real fighting spirit that makes him appeal to casual boxing fans. However when you look into his resume it becomes very easy to criticize him
Crawford has had 3 fights at junior welterweight which have seen him matched up against undersized opposition that had to come up in weight in Dierry Jean and Hank Lundy. This was also the case when he scored the biggest win of his career at lightweight against a blown up featherweight in Yuriorkis Gamboa. The critics have had a lot of reasons not to fully buy into the Terence Crawford hype, but this Postol fight represents his chance to finally silence the doubters.
Viktor Postol has become a boogey man of sorts in the junior welterweight division dating back to Danny Garcia’s reign as 140-pound champ. In October of 2014 Danny Garcia and his team decided to pay Viktor Postol step aside money in order for Danny to fight Lamont Peterson. Postol had worked his way up to become the #1 mandatory challenger for Garcia’s WBC title, Garcia avoided him and vacated the title when the time came to face Postol.
Crawford will now get the chance Garcia never gave himself and he will fight Postol in a massive unification bout to prove who the best in the division is. This is the fight a large percentage of hardcore boxing fans were dying to see. Postol is going to present some new looks for Crawford stylistically being that he’s taller than Crawford by 3 inches and has a 3.5 inch reach advantage. These are the types of disadvantages Crawford hasn’t had to deal with since he burst onto the scene with a masterful 10-round unanimous decision over Breidis Prescott, when he took a fight on 2 weeks notice.
Conventional wisdom says that Terence will fight in that same manner against Postol. Expect Crawford to fight the majority of this particular bout in the southpaw stance, which is where he throws the harder version of his jab. The key is to hurt Postol and stay patient in the process, because regardless of how great his win against Lucas Matthysse was we can’t forget that Lucas was able to buckle his knees multiple times early in the fight.
This fight seemed like it was never going to happen at one point due to the ongoing politics of boxing. Postol had accused Crawford of ducking him once he had signed the contract to fight Hank Lundy. When I approached Crawford about what was said prior to his media workout for the Hank Lundy fight he gave me his side of the story.
We asked for that fight they said they wanted 2 more fights or whatever the case may be. Postol didn’t call Terence out when Terence Crawford didn’t have an opponent. Everybody knew I didn’t have an opponent and we were looking for an opponent. You didn’t hear team Postol say ‘we’ll fight him’, but then when me and Hank Lundy signed the fight that’s when you heard team Postol saying ‘we would’ve fought Terence’. It’s all for show
It turns out that Terence was telling the truth and he’s more than ready for this big fight with Viktor Postol. Terence is fighting the best opponent in his division during his prime, which by way of default has already made him better than the lion’s share of boxing. Either way it’s “put up or shut up” for the Omaha native on July 23rd.