WBA/WBC/WBO light welterweight champion Terence “Bud” Crawford (31-0, 22 KOs) could be making his last fight at 140 when he facing unbeaten IBF champion Julius Indongo (22-0, 11 KOs) on August 19 in a fight televised on ESPN and ESPN Deportes from the Pinnacle Bank Arena in Lincoln, Nebraska. This is the fight that Top Rank wants for the 29-year-old Crawford’s career. They feel it will help increase his popularity if he can unify the light welterweight division. I don’t know if it necessarily will.
The boxing fans want to see exciting fights more so than fighters winning titles off of paper champions. There are so many titles nowadays with the watered down divisions with as many as 5 titles in each weight class. It’s more immportant now to be an exciting fighter. Crawford has a lot of work to do in that are before he can a really popular guy in boxing.
It was smart for Crawford’s promoters at Top Rank to stage the Indongo fight in Crawford’s home state, because it’s a fight that likely wouldn’t draw many boxing fans if they tried to stage it in Las Vegas, California or New York. Crawford is mainly popular in his home state of Nebraska, and his opponent 34-year-old Indongo is an unknown fighter as far as the casual boxing fans go in the U.S. Indongo is from Namibia, and he’s just not well known despite him being a world champion in holding down the IBF 140 lb. title.
It’s a good move by Top Rank to stage Crawford’s fight with Indongo on ESPN. The fight will be seen by many more boxing fans than having it shown on Top Rank PPV or on HBO World Championship Boxing. It’s unclear whether HBO passed up on the idea of showing Crawford-Indongo or if they simply didn’t have a date to shown the fight in August.
It’ll be interesting to see if Top Rank will continue to have some of Crawford’s other fights shown on HBO or not. If this the way it’s going to be from now on with Crawford’s fights being televised on ESPN Boxing, it might help him win over a sizable fan base if he can fight in a more entertaining style than what we’ve seen from him in his recent fights against Felix Diaz, John Molina Jr., Viktor Postol, Henry Lundy, Dierry Jean, Thomas Dulorme and Raymundo Beltran.
Those weren’t particularly exciting fights to watch. They involved a lot of movement, holding and counter punching by Crawford. It wasn’t the thrilling stuff that you see from Floyd Mayweather Jr. or Gennady Golovkin. It’s more the slow type of fighting that you see from guys that like to stall out fights. Crawford is a counter puncher, so he’s mostly going to jab and look to react to stuff that’s thrown at him rather than him being the on that initiates the action in his fights. The one fight where Crawford made it exciting was ion his 2014 match against Yuriorkis Gamboa.
Crawford was getting out-boxed by Gamboa in the first 4 rounds of the fight. In the 5th round, Crawford knocked Gamboa down with a shot that caught him while he had slipped on the canvas. Gamboa appeared to be falling from having slipped, and Crawford caught him with a shot while he was slipping. Gamboa then lost his cool after he got back up and started brawling. Crawford was then able to take over the fight due to his counter punching. He eventually stopped Gamboa in the 9th. By far, it was the best fight of Crawford’s 9-year pro career, thanks to Gamboa.
Indongo recently defeated Ricky Burns by a 12 round unanimous decision on April 15 to win the WBA light welterweight title in a unification fight in Glasgow, Scotland. Before that, Indongo had beaten IBF 140 lb. champion Eduard Troyanovsky by a 1st round knockout. Indongo did a better job of defeating Burns than Crawford did in his 12 round unanimous decision three years ago in March 2014.
Crawford did a lot of holding for 12 rounds in winning a decision over Burns by the scores 116-112, 117-111 and 116-112. In contrast, Indongo beat Burns by a 12 round unanimous decision by the scores 120-108, 118-110 and 116-112. Boxing News 24 scored the Burns-Indongo fight 120-108 in favor of Indongo. He didn’t do a lot of boxing like Crawford. He was boxing beautifully for 12 rounds and hurting Burns with his big power shots.
If Crawford beats Indongo, he’ll have unified the entire division in holding down all 4 titles in the 140 lb. division. Crawford is expected to move up to 147 after that to start campaigning as a welterweight. That’ll be a long overdue move by Crawford when/if he does this, as there’s nothing for him at 140. There are no fights in this division for Crawford. As it is, he’s pretty much just been spinning his wheels fighting guys like Felix Diaz, Molina Jr., Beltran, Lundy, Jean, and Dulorme.
The division where Crawford can make good money is at 147 if he can get fights against the likes of Keith Thurman, Errol Spence Jr., Amir Khan, Adrien Broner and Manny Pacquiao. I’m not sure if Crawford’s promoter Bob Arum will bother matching him up against the non-Top Rank fighters, however. Arum would need to work with Al Haymon if he were to match Crawford against the likes of Thurman, Danny Garcia, Broner, Khan and Spence.
If Arum is going to just match Crawford against his own fighters in his Top Rank stable, then we’ll see him possibly fighting guys like Pacquiao, Konstantin Ponomarev, Jeff Horn, Jessie Vargas and possibly Tim Bradley. It’s unclear what would happen with Crawford once he exhausts all those fights. Does Arum start with the rematch cycle of putting Crawford back in with those guys for another fight or three? I don’t think Crawford will become a star if he can’t fight Spence, Danny Garcia, Keith Thurman, Broner or Khan. He’s got to be able to fight those type of guys for him to get to the next level.
Crawford is No.4 in Ring Magazine’s pound for pound ratings. That’s interesting for the hardcore boxing fans. But that doesn’t translate to popularity though. You can argue that pound for pound stats are more inside boxing stuff that only the hardcore fans care about. What the casual fans care about is seeing exciting fights.
Crawford hasn’t really distinguished himself in that area of the sport. Like pound for pound No.1 Andre Ward, Crawford is a more defensive fighter, who focuses mostly on not getting hit in his fights. He likes to move around the ring, hold and defends in order to keep his opponents from landing their shots. It doesn’t make for exciting fights much of the time unfortunately.
As we’ve seen recently in Crawford’s fights against Felix Diaz and Viktor Postol, Crawford also likes to taunt his opponents by standing on the outside and sticking his tongue at them when he has his fights in the bag with a wide lead. It’s the boxing equivalent of someone scoring a touchdown and then waving the football in the face of the defender. It looks like bad sportsmanship on the part of Crawford when he does this, because he usually does it when he has his fights wrapped up. For fans of that kind of thing, they might get lucky and see Crawford use his taunting late in the fight if Indongo is still around.