Errol Spence wants 60-40 split for Terence Crawford fight

By Chris Williams

Boxingnews24.com

Errol Spence Jr. is confident that a welterweight unification between him and Terence Crawford will be taking place in 2020, but it’s going to have to be at a 60-40 split in his favor before it can take place. As long as Crawford and his promoters at Top Rank Boxing are willing to accept the smaller purse split, the fight with Spence can take place. Spence likely won’t agree to let Crawford get a 50-50 deal. If Crawford and Top Rank push for parity, the fight with Spence will likely never happen.

Spence believes Crawford fight happens in 2020

Unbeaten IBF welterweight champion Spence (25-0, 21 KOs) says the fight with WBO 147-pound champion Crawford (35-0, 26 KOs) will “definitely” happen next year, but it’s going to have to wait until after he picks up the WBC belt from champion Shawn Porter (30-2-1, 17 KOs).

That’s the belt that Spence, 29, wants to win next, and then after that he’ll see what his adviser Al Haymon of Premier Boxing Champions has in mind for him.

”I’m excited for the fight, and I’m excited to get the WBC belt to add it to my collection,” Spence said to Helen Yee Sports about him wanting to beat Porter to capture his WBC 147-pound title. ”He has something I want with the WBC belt, and I’m going to get it.”

The Spence vs. Porter fight is expected to take place at the end of the summer. It can’t happen soon enough for Spence, because he’s riding high off of his one-sided shellacking of lightweight Mikey Garcia on March 16 on Fox Sports pay-per-view at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. Spence changed his normal bull-dozing fighting style and boxed Mikey for 12 rounds to win a one-sided unanimous decision. Some boxing fans were disappointed in Spence for not looking to knockout Garcia the way that he’d been doing most of his other opponents since turning pro, but he wanted to prove a point that he could box his way to a victory. Before the Spence-Garcia fight, a lot of fans were saying how great of a boxer Mikey is. Spence wanted to send a message to those fans that he’s a better boxer than him. Never the less, Spence still didn’t get full credit from those fans, as they think the only reason he won the fight is because of his size and power advantage. That’s one reason it wasn’t a good idea for Spence to fight the 31-year-old Garcia. He was never going to get credit or beating him by the fans.

Spence seems more excited about the Porter fight than he does in facing the 31-year-old Crawford for some reason. It could be that Spence might see the rugged Porter as a tougher fight for him than the switch-hitting Crawford, who is more of a mover, boxer, counter-puncher than he is a brawler. Crawford doesn’t like to get in the trenches to slug it out. When Crawford gets hit, he tends to get on his bike and move away. In Crawford’s recent fight with Amir Khan on April 20, he hit him with a low blow in the sixth round that caused the fight to be stopped. Crawford looked frustrated at the time. Khan had been landing some shots, and having success.

Crawford needs to keep winning long enough to get Spence fight

To keep in the running for the unification fight with IBF champion Spence, Crawford must keep successfully defending his WBO title. Once Crawford loses that belt, he’ll just be just like any other contender in the welterweight division. Although Crawford is rated #2 in Ring Magazine’s pound-for-pound list, that doesn’t mean anything. If Crawford loses to one of the contenders in the WBO’s top 15, he’s not going to get a fight against Spence. Being rated by Ring Magazine in their pound-for-pound list, doesn’t mean that Crawford is unbeatable.

”We’re two competitors, and that’s a fight I’d like to make too,” Spence said about Terence Crawford. ”I think that’s going to happen, especially when I get the belts, and then I’ll call him over and then we’ll fight. That fight is definitely going to happen, but it’s not going to happen next. I’m fighting Shawn Porter next, but it’s definitely going to be next after that. It can happen, but it’s got to be negotiations. Bob [Arum] talks to Al [Haymon], and hopefully they can make something happen. I’ll shoot for 60-40, but we’ll see. Al Haymon will do my business, and will do the negotiations. He knows what I deserve, and what I should be getting. Bob knows what Terence should be getting. So hopefully, they’ll talk and come to an agreement just like when [Manny] Pacquiao and Floyd [Mayweather Jr.] fought,” Spence said.

It’s in Top Rank’s best interest for the fight against Spence to take place, but might not happen soon enough for the Nebraska native if Errol chooses to fight all the Premier Boxing Champions welterweights. It’s not just the 147-pound fighters that Spence can fight at PBC. There’s light welterweights and junior middleweights that he could face as well. If Haymon wants to extend the Spence-Crawford fight into the far future, Crawford might be too old to have a chance of beating Spence. Crawford is about to turn 32. His game is based on his hand speed. Fighters that depend on their hand speed usually start losing it in their mid-30s. There are exceptions like Adonis Stevenson, but for the most part, speedy fighters start losing their hand speed in their mid-30s. It’ll be bad news for Crawford if Spence doesn’t face him for another four years.

”Maybe in 2020,” Spence said when asked when he thinks a fight between him and Crawford can take place. ”It can definitely happen. I don’t know why we haven’t fought yet. I mean, I really don’t know. You’ve got to ask Bob [Arum]. You’ve got to ask Al [Haymon]. I don’t know if Bob called him on Wednesday [after Crawford’s recent sixth round knockout victory over Amir Khan on April 20th] like he said he was going to do. I don’t know what happened with the discussions and things like that. I just know I got a call to fight Shawn Porter. I already told Al and the people I work with, that’s a fight [Porter] I definitely want to prove I’m the best welterweight. He does have one of the belts, and I want to become the undisputed welterweight champion of the world. So we definitely have to fight, and I definitely have to get get his belt,” Spence said.

Spence is just guessing when he says he thinks the fight with Crawford will take place in 2020. That’s not realistic. Mayweather Promotions CEO Leonard Ellerbe said recently that Spence has got a number of fighters that with PBC that he can still fight before he looks to face Crawford, beginning with Porter. Ellerbe sees Spence facing Porter, Keith Thurman, Manny Pacquiao and Danny Garcia. There’s also Yordenis Ugas, a talented Cuban fighter that recently gave Porter all he could handle in a close 12 round fight. If Spence fights any of those guys in rematches, then that push the fight with Crawford even further into the future. The point is, Spence doesn’t have any idea when Ellerbe and Haymon are going to eventually get around to making the fight with Crawford. Spence is saying he thinks the Crawford fight will take place in 2020, but he’s just guessing, and perhaps telling the interviewer what he thinks she wants to hear.

”It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all,” Spence said when asked where he wants the Crawford fight to take place. ”Everything,” Spence said when asked what advantages he has over Crawford. ”I’m just a better fighter than him, period. I was expected,” Spence said about Crawford’s win over Amir Khan. ”Terence is a great fighter, so I expected him to knock him to knockout Amir Khan.”

The way that Spence beat Mikey last March by boxing him the full 12 rounds, he showed that he can fight just as good if not better than Crawford when he’s focusing on just fighting a technical match. Spence has the added element to his game of being able to use his size and power to just bull-doze his opponents. Crawford can do that, because he’s not a big welterweight and he’s not a huge puncher at the weight.

Spence vs. Crawford needs a lot more time to marinate

The rumored low PPV numbers for the Crawford-Khan fight on ESPN suggests that Crawford isn’t ready to fight Spence yet. Terence’s popularity isn’t at the level where it needs to be for a match between him and Spence to be worth putting together right now. This fight unfortunately needs a good four, maybe five years of marinating before it can be put together. It’s another Mayweather vs. Pacquiao type of fight where there needs to be five to six good years of marinating before the match-up can make the huge money on PPV. As long as both guys keep winning during the next half decade, it should bring in massive money for both guys.