By Bart Barry-
Saturday at Madison Square Garden in a fight for the ESPN welterweight title Nebraska’s Terence “Bud” Crawford stopped Lithuania’s Egidijus “Mean Machine” Kavaliauskas in round 9, defending his ESPN-pound-for-pound rating and further burnishing credentials Crawford insists are already hall-of-fame quality. Too, ESPN’s Joe Tessitore called the last minutes of Crawford’s ringwalk “precious”?
Bud Crawford is bored. You are bored. Bud Crawford knows you are bored. (And now, humorously enough, he knows you know he’s bored.) That mutual boredom leads a proud man like Bud to do imprudent things for his own amusement and to a lesser extent your amusement. That’s half the reason for Crawford’s poor start Saturday but not the bad half. Boredom can be remedied, after all.
The bad part of the reason for Crawford’s poor start Saturday is that his skills are gradually eroding in the acid rain of average competition.
Boxing is unique among professional sports in its ability to waste a healthy participant’s prime years. By any measure Crawford’s prime is being wasted. That’s boxing’s fault, the system’s fault, much more than any one person’s or organization’s or broadcast network’s.
Boxing does this to many of its participants, but you rarely notice because the case is never obvious as Crawford’s is right now. Generally these things happen to a 29-year-old stuck in a small market and affiliated with the wrong manager, some fighter either too good or too loyal to get the fights a bigger handler might get him. If ever he breaks-through his story becomes an inspirational one of perseverance and seizing one’s chance on the odd chance it is presented and almost never about bad luck and a system that squanders its participants’ primes.
Bud already did his b-side breaking-through years ago. Now his staybusy mandatory defenses illuminate fundamental flaws in our beloved sport’s meritocracy.
Bud’s promoter, Top Rank, knows all this much better than even Bud does, and so it gives him a semiannual pulpit from which to vent on America’s mostwatched sports network. Bud gets the relief of telling ESPN viewers what he opines of PBC’s keepaway game, and the honor of being called boxing’s best prizefighter despite years of middling competition, and Top Rank and ESPN get promotional rights to the world’s best prizefighter. And everybody gets money enough to endure the arrangement another year longer.
But a crossroads approaches for Bud and his promoter, if not his network. Another couple years like 2019 and age and poor competition’ll’ve eroded Bud’s skills to a point Top Rank’s matchmakers’ll know Bud is no longer great enough to justify the risk of putting him in with the world’s best welterweights – not when another two years of revenues can be milked from the ESPN cow, fighting unification matches with Julius Indongo or title defenses with Jeff Horn.
Annual interviews with the perennially aggrieved Dre Ward will feature a tasting menu of early-retirement threats, PBC callouts, legal misunderstandings explained, and commiserating about what untrustworthy media rated both men world’s best, both before and after they deserved it. In between there will be more close calls explained away by Bo Mack – Bud’s charismatic trainer now enjoying his own synergistic relationship with ESPN – and surliness and sadism. At the end of the run there will be 10 impressionable kids saying Crawford is an alltime great for every one of the rest of us lamenting the career Crawford might’ve had were boxing run like football or hockey. Boxing writers’ll selforganize around Bud’s already B-Hop-like autohagiography and bully themselves into putting Bud in Canastota.
There are some risks inherent in Bud’s early retirement threats, though, especially now that he’s spoken them to the aforementioned and early retired Andre Ward: Sometime in the next few years Manny Pacquiao is going to retire, and the very last thing Bud wants is historians placing those two resumes side-by-side.
Again, little to none of this is Crawford’s fault. But again-again, absolutely none of it is our faults as aficionados.
Crawford is neither talented nor lucky as Pacquiao. Were he as talented he’d be fighting Canelo at 168 pounds in May, and were he as lucky he’d have had a trilogy with Yuriorkis Gamboa and a pair of fights with Vasyl Lomachenko and a tetralogy with Errol Spence. Instead he’s stuck reminding viewers Egidijus Kavaliauskas was still undefeated on Saturday afternoon and reviving Money May’s canard about the boxing media not knowing anything about boxing.
We know enough to know Crawford ate righthands Saturday night he’s not proud of this morning. We know that if he tried to race forward willfully against any of PBC’s top four welterweights the way he did against Kavaliauskas he’d have spent more than a flashing moment on the canvas. We know three years comprising John Molina, Felix Diaz, Julius Indongo, Jeff Horn, Jose Benavidez (on one good leg) and Amir Khan is no one’s idea of a path to enlightenment.
And we know Bud knows we know these things, and all of it pisses him off. He’s a great talent and a true fighter, nevertheless. It’s a stain on our sport he’ll unlikely get his chance to be remembered as more than that.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
