By Chris Williams: Terence Crawford’s trainer Brian ‘BoMac’ McIntyre says it’s not their fault that Errol Spence Jr looked badly weight drained & weakened for their fight last Saturday night.
BoMac states that Spence (28-1, 22 KOs) agreed to and “signed” to fight Crawford (40-0, 31 KOs), so that’s what happens.
In a video of Spence months before the fight, he appeared fat, with a noticeable paunch, looking well over 200 lbs. Some feel that Spence essentially half-starved and ran himself ragged, jogging for miles & miles on a daily basis to reduce the 60+ lbs of fat & muscle from his frame.
In the end, Spence was successful in getting down to 147 for the weigh-in, but he looked like a living corpse on the night of the fight.
Spence’s appearance was so weak that he would have been food for the fringe contenders at 147, like David Avanesyan, Alexis Rocha, Blair Cobbs, and Egidijus Kavaliauskas. There’s little doubt that Spence would have lost to all of those fighters in the state he was in.
Spence had been enjoying himself during his year out of the ring since his last fight against Yordenis Ugas, looking like he’d been eating high on the hog and swelling up to the point where he no longer resembled an active professional athlete.
Whether it was arrogance on Spence’s part or perhaps he no longer cared, given that money was going to be so good, he agreed to face Crawford on July 29th. What a mistake.
In hindsight, Spence should have vacated his three welterweight titles and given Crawford a take-it-or-leave-it offer to fight him at 168. Forget 154 or 160 because Spence was too big for either of those divisions to make weight without being drained.
“I thought the fight was going to be a little bit more competitive. Like I said before, it was going to be tough for the first couple of rounds, first four or five rounds, but then Bud started pouring it on a little bit more,” said Brian ‘BoMac’ McIntyre to Pro Boxing Fans about his thought on Terence Crawford’s win over Errol Spence Jr
Errol looked tired & weak from the get-go, but his condition got worse by the sixth round, to the point where he had nothing on his punches and had the look of someone that needed to sit down and rest for a few hours due to his fatigued appearance.
“That’s not our fault. He signed the contract for 147. He’d been fighting at 147, and that’s what he signed up for. So that’s not our fault. We have no blame for that,” BoMac said when told that boxing fans believe Spence showed signs of being ‘weight drained’ for the fight last Saturday night and wasn’t 100%.
“First, give him time to rest, spend time with his family, have a vacation, and then we’ll go back to the drawing board to see if we want to go up to 154 to try and get some titles or maybe do the rematch. We’ll see,” said BoMac.
