-
Nick Parkinson
It was all very different from the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas when Terence Crawford and Errol Spence Jr. first fought for world titles.
Back in 2014 and 2017, Crawford and Spence traveled thousands of miles to challenge for their first world titles in front of hostile crowds in the United Kingdom.
Crawford has gone on to win 17 consecutive world title fights, and Spence seven, since those nights in Glasgow, Scotland, and Sheffield, England, respectively.
After much anticipation and delay, Spence (WBC, WBA, IBF) and Crawford (WBO) will eventually box to decide the undisputed welterweight champion — and pound-for-pound No. 1 — at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas on Saturday in what will perhaps be boxing’s biggest fight of 2023.
But Spence and Crawford received a lot less attention, acclaim and money when they first arrived on the world title stage at venues very different from T-Mobile Arena.
How it started for Crawford
A champion’s home crowd can feel like another opponent for a challenger to overcome, especially if the fight is close and it goes to the judges’ scorecards after 12 rounds. But Crawford was in such sublime form that a controversial decision was never a prospect.
Crawford arrived in Glasgow to challenge local hero Ricky Burns for his WBO lightweight world title in March 2014, carrying a reputation as a talented prospect but was still relatively unknown.
Crawford, then 26, dominated from the fourth round on to win by scores of 116-112, 117-111 and 116-112 as Burns suffered his first defeat in 10 world title fights in front of a crowd of 10,000 at the indoor Scottish Exhibition Centre.
The Nebraska native boarded his flight back home from Scotland with his reputation enhanced — and a world title — after outclassing Burns. No longer was Crawford a prospect, but a main player in the lightweight division. He was too quick and too slick for Burns in his first pro fight outside the United States and in his first fight to go 12 rounds.
“You can see why he’s being touted as the next big thing in America — the best man won on the night,” Burns said afterward. “He was always in and out. I was overreaching and he was getting me with counters.”
Before the year was out, Crawford registered wins over elite-level fighters Yuriorkis Gamboa — whom he dropped four times before the ninth-round stoppage — and veteran Raymundo Beltran, and his career continued its upward trajectory as he became a three-division world champion and pound-for-pound No. 1.
How it started for Spence
Like Crawford, Spence began his journey to the elite level in the U.K. amid very different surroundings compared to what it will be like next week in Vegas.
Spence traveled to England in May 2017 to face Kell Brook in front 27,000 of his home city fans at the outdoor Bramall Lane, home of English Premier League team Sheffield United and one of the oldest soccer stadiums in the world.
With its sheer and old-fashioned stands, the stadium was unlike anywhere Spence had boxed before or since. Armed police officers and sniffer dogs were part of increased security at Brook-Spence after a suicide bomber killed 22 people — many of them children — and injured hundreds more at a performance by singer Ariana Grande at Manchester Arena six days earlier.
It was also cold and raining on the night of the fight in May, a contrast to the climate Spence had enjoy at home in Texas. But despite all of this, a 27-year-old Spence boxed superbly and the stinging accuracy of his punching took its toll on the Englishman.
Brook, who had made three successful defenses, sunk to one knee in the 11th round without being hit but unable to see as he rubbed his swollen left eye while he was counted out. Spence forced two knockdowns and Brook was left with a broken eye socket for the second successive fight (he suffered a fractured right eye socket in a TKO loss to Gennadiy Golovkin almost nine months earlier), and he was taken straight to a hospital after the fight.
At the postfight news conference held in one of the soccer club’s function rooms under the main stand, Spence sat with his toddler daughter on one knee and talked about world title unification fights against rival champions Keith Thurman and Manny Pacquiao (neither materialized).
“I want to fight Keith Thurman and Manny Pacquiao; I want to unify the titles and become No. 1 in the division,” Spence said within an hour of winning the IBF belt. “I knew he (Brook) was going to be strong and fast, and he can punch, so I had to show true grit to pull through, and I did.
“This was a great experience in my young career and my first world title in front of nearly 30,000 in the champion’s hometown. This was a legacy-defining fight and it shows I have strong grit and I can pull it out.”
Spence landed over a 100 more punches than Brook and was ahead on all three judges’ scorecards — 97-92, 96-93 and 95-94 — when Brook was counted out.
The following day, Brook said: “He’s one of the best kids I’ve been in with, if not the best. I knew from Round 7 that the eye had gone and progressively as the rounds went on. I tried to get through the fight and it kept going double-vision and then coming back into line.”
In 2020, Crawford ruthlessly stopped Brook in the fourth round to retain his WBO welterweight belt, but Brook was left favoring Spence to win a potential fight with Crawford.
Brook told ESPN in 2021: “Spence wins because he’s so seasoned, he’s been a world champion, he went to the [2012] Olympics, he’s been at welterweight longer than Crawford and he has just lived the life for so long. Nothing will faze him. He’s also a natural southpaw, which is going to be important against Crawford. If I had switched against Crawford to southpaw, it might have been different.
“But Spence is a natural southpaw and he will be able to adapt to fighting Crawford. I don’t believe Crawford would’ve beat me if I had switched; it was my fight to win, but he caught me with a really accurate shot.”
Brook recovered from the Crawford defeat to record his most memorable win, stopping English rival Amir Khan in six rounds in February 2022 and has not fought since. But Burns is due to fight fellow veteran Willie Limond on Sept. 1.
Burns, now 40, has suffered five more defeats since losing to Crawford, but in 2016 he became a three-division world champion.