Errol Spence Jr. is back in training for what is hoped will be a fight. The former IBF/WBC/WBO welterweight champion Spence (28-1, 22 KOs) hasn’t fought since his ninth-round knockout loss to Terence Crawford last July, and he needs to get back in action.
Assessing Spence’s Form
In the brief training clip of Spence, he looks in good shape, with just a little bit of weight to trim off and a need to add more speed. He appeared a little slow in the clip, and he’s going to need to be quicker for him to compete against the top ten-level opposition at junior middleweight.
It would be a good idea for Spence to ease his way back into the competition by taking a tune-up first before facing one of the killers at 154. He’s too big to compete at 147 any longer obviously, so he’s going to be making a jump up against bigger, more powerful opposition than the guys he’d been accustomed to fighting at welterweight.
Dallas Gone Turn Up for EJ 💪🏿 pic.twitter.com/dKPcXgs6t8
— D A L L A S (@JRueCity) May 8, 2024
Errol has been too inactive and gone through too much in the last five years for him to jump in with one of the talented fighters at junior middleweight. Besides the beatdown from Crawford that Spence will be coming back from, he’s had these issues that have whittled away his form since 2019:
- Two car wrecks: The 2019 car crash was the worst for Spence, as he was thrown from his Ferrari and in bad shape from that accident.
- Eye injuries: Detached retina and cataract.
- Weight gain: Spence has let his weight get out of control between fights and turned his training camps into mini-fat farms.
- Inactivity: Just two fights in the last three years.
Spence turned 34 last March, and he’s fought only two times in the last three years since 2021. With that inactivity, two car crashes, and weight gain, it wasn’t surprising that Crawford blew Spence out of the water in their mega-fight.
Redemption or Fading Star?
Spence performed much worse than Crawford’s previous two opponents, David Avanesyan and Shawn Porter, showing that he’d lost the edge he once had due to outside-of-the-ring activities.
That version of Spence that we saw made Crawford look better than he actually is, and he may have fooled casual boxing fans, who weren’t aware of Errol’s outside-of-the-ring issues that led to him being a deteriorated shell of what he once was.