LAS VEGAS — Shortly after moving up in weight and eking out a win in the closest fight of his career, Terence Crawford — then on the cusp of his 37th birthday — was insisting on jumping another two divisions to fight the undisputed 168-pound champion, Canelo Alvarez. This was 13 months ago. Crawford was addressing an audience of one: his patron, the Saudi Arabian boxing financier, Turki Alalshikh.
Even by boxing standards — I use the term advisedly, as boxing has only few and dubious standards — it seemed a semi-preposterous idea. Alalshikh shot him a look. “But the weight?” he said.
Actually, it was more than just the weight. Both history and common sense favor not merely the naturally bigger man, but the younger one, and the so-called “A side.” Paired with Canelo — boxing’s leading man, who had already generated almost half a billion dollars in purses — Crawford was none of those things. What’s more, he would do it without insisting on any of the usual contractual niceties designed to even the odds: no catchweight, no rehydration clause.
Alalshikh proposed a couple of very lucrative, if more sensible, alternatives: Vergil Ortiz Jr. or Jaron “Boots” Ennis, each of them undefeated young stars with great ambition at 154 pounds. Crawford refused to entertain either option. “Boots is not a megafight,” he said. “Vergil Ortiz is not a megafight. This is the tail end of my career. They’re going to say, ‘You were supposed to win.’ I want Canelo Alvarez.”
He wanted the fight he wasn’t supposed to win.
“OK,” said Alalshikh, relenting. “I’m going to try to get that fight for you.”
“That’s the only fight I want,” said Crawford.
Thirteen months hence, Canelo and Crawford will fight Saturday at Allegiant Stadium. Canelo agreed to the fight in return for a purse believed to be in excess of $100 million (“More than that,” Alalshikh proclaimed at Thursday’s news conference) — an offer that even the sport’s leading man couldn’t refuse. But it all began with Crawford. “That’s how we got here,” he says.
A generation of fighters has come to look upon Canelo less as a rival than as a score, a jackpot, a career payday. Their victories, it seems, were signing the contracts, not fighting the fights. But Crawford looks to Canelo as his white whale, something he was stalking long before that meeting with Alalshikh: an existential corrective for everything he believes has afflicted his career, an answer for every slight going back to the amateurs, from fighters who wouldn’t fight him to promoters who failed to promote him, a source of eternal respect and stature. But only if he wins.
In fact, Crawford has been studying Canelo since at least 2015, when he showed up at Mandalay Bay to watch Alvarez beat a future Hall of Famer, Miguel Cotto, for his first middleweight title. Crawford, by comparison, then held the WBO junior welterweight title. “I didn’t think fighting Canelo would be a thing,” he says. “We were too far apart in weight classes.”
Gradually, though, it would become a thing. In 2021, Crawford — by then a welterweight champion, though desperately lacking for worthy opponents — attended Alvarez’s stay-busy fight against somebody named Avni Yildirim in Miami. Canelo, now the WBC’s 168-pound champion, knocked out Yildirim in the third round. But even as he did, the seed had been planted. Crawford wouldn’t mention it in public, but it was in the back of his mind.
By 2023, though, he had begun his behind-the-scenes campaign to land a Canelo fight. Late that year, he met with then-WBO president Francisco “Paco” Valcarcel in Puerto Rico and broached the idea.
“I was shocked,” recalls Valcarcel. While Crawford had now beaten Errol Spence Jr. to become undisputed at 147 pounds, Canelo — who had already won a world title by knockout at 175 — was undisputed at 168. “Why don’t you wait a couple years?” Valcarcel advised gently.
“I can’t wait,” Crawford shot back, citing his age. “I can beat him.”
By now, Crawford was a regular at Canelo’s biannual fights, and still fresh in his mind was Canelo’s victory over Jermell Charlo. Charlo, coming up from 154 pounds, was dropped in Round 7. After that, though, it was all paint-by-numbers. “He didn’t fight to win,” Crawford says of Charlo. “He just fought to survive.”
In many respects, Canelo-Charlo has become an all-too-familiar template in the arc of Alvarez’s career: a single knockdown that lumbers on predictably to a unanimous decision. Such was the case in Canelo’s wins over the likes of John Ryder, Jaime Munguia and Edgar Berlanga.
“They wanted the payday,” Crawford tells me. “They didn’t want to win the fight. Going the 12 rounds was a victory to them.”
If Canelo’s most recent victory — for which Crawford traveled all the way to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — lacked even the pro forma knockdown, his opponent, William Scull, was intent on nothing so much as survival. Crawford, meanwhile, fights only to destroy.
That said, if it’s fair to judge Canelo based on past performances, what of Crawford’s? His last fight, moving up to 154 and winning a close if unanimous decision over the estimable Israil Madrimov, fell far short of making a case for Canelo.
“Madrimov taught me patience,” says Crawford. “He was so herky-jerky and so explosive — bouncing back and forth, all those crazy antics. But Canelo doesn’t have any of that in his arsenal. I don’t have to worry about any of that with him.”
What about the age, though? Alvarez is 35. Crawford is two weeks from his 38th birthday, old by the standards of any division in any era, and certainly not an optimal time to jump up multiple divisions. Then again, Alvarez has fought at least 520 rounds (maybe more, as there are believed to be several early fights of his that never made it into the records) as a pro. He has had two competitive fights with the hard-hitting Gennadiy Golovkin, and losses to Floyd Mayweather and, more recently, Dmitry Bivol. Crawford, for his part, has never been beaten, or beaten down, in 245 pro rounds. Who’s older in boxing years? I wonder.
“He is for sure,” says Crawford. “He started fighting professional at 15.”
Still, Alvarez remains not merely the “A side,” but an economy unto himself. Considering the fight is on Mexican Independence Day weekend, it will certainly be a pro-Canelo crowd, but more than that, Canelo will be the presumptive beneficiary of any doubt on the judges’ scorecards. Crawford doesn’t disagree. He knows he can’t fight his typical fight, which involves a relatively slow start as he downloads his opponent’s tendencies. He needs to start fast.
“Of course, of course,” he says. “I got to set the tone. You have to set the tone with Canelo — to let the judges know you’re putting rounds in the bank. That’s how I look at it: one round at a time. Don’t go in and try to get a knockout in the first round. Just put rounds in the bank. And make sure you’re winning those rounds decisively.”
The way Crawford explains it — the way he has been explaining it to himself for years now — makes his existential errand sound, well, perfectly reasonable. Maybe that’s how you hunt white whales, even those with red hair, when the only thing you want is what you’re not supposed to have.
