Bud Crawford Confirms Money Held Up Negotiations with Spence and Haymon
There is no question that the boxing world recently absorbed a heavy symbolic blow to the belly. This took place when WBO welterweight champion Terence “Bud” Crawford (38-0, 29 KO’s) announced a showdown with David Avanesyan. It was such a shock because Bud was deep in negotiations with unified 147-pound champion Errol “The Truth” Spence Jr (28-0, 22 KO’s). In fact, this bout for undisputed was closer to coming to reality than ever before. Now, the fight has been cast right back into limbo.
Naturally both sides will say that the other is too blame. Yet, in a rare move, Crawford took to his social media to air out his side of the situation. According to Bud, he ultimately left the discussion table because he felt he was getting too short of a stick to proceed. Having penned another assignment with Avanesyan, Bud doesn’t feel at all like he did anything out of bounds.
“I’m not the type of guy to sit on my ass, or sit on my hands for no man, to feed my family. So you mad at me for taking a fight with a tough opponent? You may not know him, but he’s a tough opponent, for a bigger purse! [And] a guarantee that I wasn’t even going to get [with Spence]! You crazy in the head! So here we go back to square one! What do you really expect? You expect me to be disrespected, ran over, stepped on and sit there and just take it? That’s crazy, that ain’t even my style.”
YOU LEFT THE BAG?!
While Bud was airing his discontentment with the situation, it was clear that the financial side of the transaction was gumming up the gears. Rumors throughout the industry held that Bud wanted to check every cent being spent or collected for the event and this extensive audit was holding up production. During his live session, Crawford essentially admitted that this was true. In the course of doing this however, the Nebraska native and one-time undisputed super lightweight champion dropped a potential bombshell.
“Of course me and Al [Haymon] are going back and forth, back and forth about the numbers; we’re not going back and forth about anything else. We are just going back and forth about the numbers. All in all, I had two companies that reached out to me that wanted to give me and Spence $25 million guaranteed, up front.
So a real guy like myself, I call Spence…the difference between me and the difference between Spence is I am really my own boss now and he is not […] he [Spence] didn’t call me back, so I proposed it to Al…Al told me straight up, “I’m not letting nobody touch this fight!”
Only time will tell what will become of this saga next. Yet, there is little doubt that The Truth will respond to Crawford’s recent public confessional in kind and swiftly. Sadly though, for the foreseeable future, these two will only be jousting via social media.
By: Bakari Simpson
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