Karl Dargan corroborates Crawford’s story
Over the last week leading into August, WBC world featherweight champion “Mr.” Gary Russell (31-1, 18 KO’s) and WBO world welterweight champion Terence “Bud” Crawford (36-0 27 KO’s) have become ensnared in a war of words. The animosity is rooted in an incident that took place between the two fighters well back in 2007.
After Russell revived the story in a recent interview, and subsequently shook up a hornets nest, the back and forth bickering from each boxer went viral. The two versions of the same story had very big differences. However, one thing that they mutually agreed upon was that there were ample witnesses to the altercation.
Thankfully, one of the primary principles in the story, Karl Dargan, has come forward to offer his eye witness account.
DARGAN DEBRIEFING
On that fateful day, Bud had just exited the ring after sparring with Karl “Dynamite” Dargan (19-1, 9 KO’s). Witnessing the recent uproar between the fighters, Dynamite provided his remembrance of the now infamous day via his Instagram account:
“Yo, what up, this is Karl “Dynamite” Dargan here to address the Gary Russell with Terence Crawford altercation. It was the PAN AM camp 2007. We had just made the PAN AM team and it was the first camp we had before we we’re going to Brazil.”
“…so me and Bud, we are sharing a room. We in the room about to go to sparring, so we talking shit to each other. You know, competitiveness with each other, ‘I’m going to turn it up on you today!’. We get in the ring, we boxing, but it got so heated. Like, in between rounds we wasn’t even going to our corners to listen to the coaches. So once the coaches got a whiff on it, they was like, ‘yo, these dudes are really fighting’.”
“So we in the ring going back and forth, back and forth, swimming without getting wet, talking shit, talking shit and Coach Dan seen how serious we were with each and he just basically like, ‘yo, stop, stop, stop, stop, that’s it, that’s it!’ They stopped the sparring session. We weren’t doing computer scoring that sparring session, but they stopped it because we were like too serious with each other.”
“So when they stopped it, Bud got out the ring. I am still in the ring and he walking to where everybody at, where the rest of the team at…then a couple second later all I hear is ‘ooohhh!’ I turn around and they holding Terence because he trying to get loose or whatever because apparently he just got sucker punched.”
“…Before the camp, when we was at the qualifiers, Terence had got into an altercation with one of the guys from Puerto Rico and they was fighting in the stands. And they told Bud, ‘yo, if get in trouble again they might send you home.’ So that incident happened, the coaches had a meeting and wound up sending him home. But that’s the part of the story that I remember…the sucker punch did happen!”
By: Bakari Simpson
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