By Bart Barry-
Saturday at Madison Square Garden, Nebraska junior welterweight champion Terence Crawford beat Dominican Felix Diaz by corner stoppage after 10 rounds in a fight enabled by HBO. If it wasn’t dreary neither was it masterful, and if shifting the onus of entertainment from punchers to writers was Crawford’s strategy he’ll find it an open failure in what follows: As Crawford was insufficiently inspired to entertain Saturday neither was his performance sufficiently inspirational to engender any imaginative explanations.
Terence Crawford is bored with boxing. And boredom leads to something like contempt, and I can relate because I’m bored with Terence Crawford and it’s leading me to watch Crawford and his fights with increasing contempt.
Why Saturday’s match had to be stopped is very hard to say; an Olympic gold medalist signs for a championship chance and without being dropped or even buckled needs his corner to rescue him before the championship rounds even commence, in Madison Square Garden? We might as well return to open scoring if we’re going to use this mercy rule, and stop broadcasting such tripe.
A number of times Saturday, in a championship fight, mind you, the combatants had to be instructed by referee Steve Willis to mill, as each scowled his opponent’s way and drew some sort of line with his glove and bade his opponent cross it. Neither man cared to make combat badly enough to forgo exact terms, and this led Crawford to show Diaz increasing contempt, something, once more, Crawford partisans outside Nebraska now begin to share.
Watching the contest with volume muted, as I do whenever possible, I set myself in the seat of an imaginary viewer who flipped to HBO, or was already there for some other reason, because somewhere he’d heard or read about this Crawford dude, son of Omaha’s meanest streets (boxing alone could find their intersection), and saw tentative tapping early and good footwork and something like a bitter countenance and quite a lot of confidence that did not manifest as action. Crawford engaged when threatened and did things technically and well enough, but there was no excitement, and these things, over and again, cannot be argued for; nobody had to talk himself into finding Crawford’s signature match against Yuriorkis Gamboa thrilling.
Saturday’s attendance number in Manhattan appears unavailable, or at least not included in any official reports, not unlike the way Crawford’s pay-per-view number against Viktor Postol went untallied for a good long time: no announcement is indeed an announcement.
Crawford remains in a sticky place with his promoter, Bob Arum – who was ornery as hell Saturday after his champion’s supposedly impressive knockout victory – not wishing to bid goodbye his one reliable revenue stream, Manny Pacquiao, till no hope remains of a last gigantic payday (not to be found in Australia or Nebraska), and Crawford entertaining evidently no pressing desire to move to welterweight till a unification is achieved, as if that were still meaningful to anyone. Part-time Pacquiao is still good enough to buzz Crawford if he catches him at 147 pounds, and there’s a good chance their match might be a good one – while Pacquiao’s days of entertaining fights ended with Juan Manuel Marquez’s right fist years ago, he’s fought better competition since the Shoulder Match with Money May than Crawford has – good enough even to resuscitate interest in Crawford.
Would anyone who watched Saturday’s match believe Crawford made the fight of the year in 2014, when he . . .
And like that, writing about Crawford, once more, has gotten dull (notice how short on words ringside accounts were for a championship match that lasted 30 minutes). Enough then.
Let’s address Gary Russell’s dominating win over hardhitting . . . just kidding. Let’s not.
That leaves this week’s noteworthy match, Englishman Kell Brook (1-1 in career defining fights) against American Olympian Errol Spence who might be genuinely special and is taking the sort of risk a genuinely special fighter takes (not unlike Crawford’s 2014 trip to Scotland to beat Ricky Burns) in a fight so good, so potentially exciting, experts can’t help but interpret it as a sign of PBC’s financial woes, even if this will be the second such welterweight fight PBC has made in the first half of 2017.
Brook has not punched professionally since his illadvised September vacation in the middleweight division, and some combination of Brook’s necessary weightloss and reconstructive facial surgery does raise some questions about his fitness for the Spence fight. Brook will enjoy British scoring, though, and a well-lubricated Yorkshire crowd when the bell rings on this match, and his experience is such Spence should be unable to unscrew him quickly as he’s done to most other men set across from him.
I was ringside for three of Spence’s first 12 prizefights and entirely skeptical of anyone off that 2012 U.S. Olympic team (by medal count, the worst in American history), but Spence appeared kinda special. He moved better and hit with more commitment than the rest of a team that, in yet another bit of eye-for-talent foreshadowing, Al Haymon signed and shepherded into the professional ranks.
What’s much more important than the likelihood of Brook-Spence being an excellent match is that it will open without a winner already established in the mind of every aficionado, unlike last weekend’s curdled fare. That’s a special occasion. And if the winner fights Keith Thurman, in a true welterweight unification match in the fall, PBC may well have turned a corner.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
