Spence – Crawford will be DOA if no deal in next two months says Stephen Espinoza

By Boxing News - 04/25/2023 - Comments

By Jim Calfa: Showtime’s Stephen Espinoza says if there’s no deal for the Errol Spence Jr vs. Terence Crawford fight in the next two months, then the fight will never happen.

They’ve been trying to negotiate the Spence-Crawford fight for over a year with no luck, but it’s now “98%” done. At least, that’s what Espinoza is saying.

The amount of interest that the fans once had in seeing this fight has dropped off the map, with many of them having grown bored by this fight. It’s not just this fight.

The popularity of Spence and Crawford has deteriorated due to them fighting lackluster opposition and only once a year.

They’re both following in the Gennadiy Golovkin modee of how to destroy their popularity by rarely fighting and only against weak opposition.

“I hate to say it, but probably so,” said Stephen Espinoza to iFL TV when asked if Errol Spence Jr vs. Terence Crawford would be ‘dead on arrival’ if no deal in the next couple of months. “If we’re not able to close the deal in the next couple of months because I don’t want to close the door.

“If we’re not able to close a deal in the next couple of months, it would mean that there were active, meaningful discussions basically for a year straight, and if we’re not able to reach an agreement by that point then the odds are that it’s never going to happen,” said Espinoza about the Spence vs. Crawford undisputed clash.

“We’re getting close. We were also getting close last fall, and it fell apart,” said Espinzoa to K.O. Artist Sports on the Spence-Crawford fight. “I don’t want to go overanxious. I’m as disappointed as anybody else, but we definitely made a lot of progress over the last couple of weeks, and we’re getting very, very close.

“We were 97 or 98% there [last time]. We’re closer than that. Does that make us 99%? I’m a big proponent of saying it’s not done until it’s done. Being 98% is better than saying it’s 80% done, but it’s still not done. June 17th would have been aggressive, and it’s still really aggressive.

“That’s less than two months away, and I think that would be rushing it. If we are able to get it done, it’ll be this summer, and I’m still really hopeful that’s when we’re able to announce, hopefully soon. I don’t like to toot our own horn that much.

“In a span of a couple of months, we’ve got Benavidez-Plant, we’ve got Davis-Garcia, and Spence-Crawford. That has got to go down as one of the best runs in recent memory,” said Espinoza.

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