Terence Crawford May Retire…Good Riddance And So What?

Some boxing people “in the know” think that Terence “Bud” Crawford may actually retire rather than take fights he deems as lesser bouts.

“I don’t think Crawford will fight again because I think he’s made really solid money in his last couple of fights,” promoter Eddie Hearn told talkSport. “I don’t think he wants to fight Vergil Ortiz or Jaron ‘Boots’ Ennis. I think the only way Crawford will fight again is Canelo Alvarez because he’s got used to that pay. He probably thinks he’ll fight again, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t. So inactive as well. I think he’s happy to sit out until the end of next year. He’ll be just waiting [for] if the Canelo fight comes up.”

Fine. Good. So What? Good Riddance.

And this is coming from a writer who once considered himself a hardcore Terence Crawford mark or “stan,” as they call it now. The bad taste left behind after a legitimately feel-good moment in July of 2023, when he beat Errol Spence to become unified welterweight champ, probably can’t be washed away at this point. So, let the perpetually disgruntled “Bud” just go away.

If there were a world record for the time it took for a fighter to go from inspirational scrapper to insipid prima-donna, Terence “Bud” Crawford would’ve smashed that record easily.

Hell, the guy was just starting his post-Spence mugging media tour when he made it known that he was most definitely not going to be a bigger, better kind of boxing star.

“Listen, right now in my career, a lotta people like, ‘Boots this, Boots that, Boots this,’” Crawford said during an August appearance on ‘The Breakfast Club,’ in reference to the challenge of consensus no. 1 welterweight contender, Jaron “Boots” Ennis.

“You know, fightin’ Boots is a lose-lose situation…It’s not a mega-fight. It’s gonna sell a little bit because of [my] name, what [I] just accomplished, but..there’s nothing really at stake with fightin’ Boots…Definitely, a hundred percent about the money…Not takin’ anything away from Boots, but you know, where I am at in my career right now, I done fought my ass off to get to where I am. And I deserve to do whatever the f**k I wanna do. And I don’t care what nobody say, how anybody feels or any of that. You know, f**k ‘em.”

This was just days after he stopped being the guy crying about being frozen out of opportunities and, apparently, began being the guy who freezes others out of opportunities.

And now, just as he pined away for Errol Spence, tantruming his way to the eventual big-ticket fight he lusted after, he hopes to do the same with a Canelo Alvarez fight– at the expense of anything and anyone else.

The reality is that Crawford, for all his pissing and grumbling and victim playing, has led a charmed professional life. He fell into a sweet ESPN deal via Top Rank, bagged a ridiculously large one-fight payday via BLK Prime after leaving Top Rank, and then had Errol Spence and PBC pretty much bend over backwards to bring him into the biggest fight of his career– all, despite, let’s be honest here, never really being able to draw “star” numbers outside of his home town of Omaha, Nebraska.

And now Crawford finds himself in the loving embrace of boxing’s biggest and most generous sugar daddy, Saudi Arabia point man Turki Alalshikh, who provided him an exorbitant payday to headline a financial flop of a card in Los Angeles this past August 3.

But even as he’s been wedged into a spot at the head of the boxing table as a new world titlist in the junior middleweight division, with several opportunities pretty much laid at his feet, he’s still pouting obstinately for what he doesn’t have, willing to waste away a career that, just over a year ago, he was lamenting being wasted away.

So, whatever.

Terence Crawford is a great fighter and a thrill to watch. His skills and mindset put him in the same hallowed boxing-space as legends such as Sugar Ray Leonard, Thomas Hearns, and Roberto Duran. But the guy’s just such a drama queen and chronic buzz kill.

With so many great fights he could make for himself right now, he’s opted to make none.

Go away, then.