Canelo-Crawford — How competition drives Terence Crawford

TERENCE CRAWFORD’S EXISTENCE revolves around proving people wrong.

Even today, as ESPN’s No. 3 pound-for-pound fighter prepares to move up two weight classes to challenge Canelo Alvarez on Saturday (Netflix, 9 p.m. ET) for the Mexican fighter’s world championships at 168 pounds, Crawford, a former two-division undisputed champion, has to prevail.

It’s not just winning at boxing. Table tennis, chess, video games, basketball, playing cards, debating, cooking, cleaning, who has the better music playlist. Quite literally, everything. Crawford is driven primarily by doing what people say cannot be done.

“It’s just something I was born with,” Crawford told ESPN while training at the UFC Performance Institute in Las Vegas in July. “I just think that being undersized my entire life made me have to work harder than other people who were blessed with natural talent, size and things like that.

“Losing is not an option. I have to win at all costs and no matter what.”

For his latest competitive feat, Crawford plans to carve out history. Being a two-division undisputed men’s champion is no longer an exclusive club, with Oleksandr Usyk and Naoya Inoue sharing residence with Crawford. But three divisions? No men’s boxer has accomplished the achievement (Claressa Shields has done it in women’s boxing).

Should he win, Crawford also will join the late South African fighter Dingaan “The Rose of Soweto” Thobela as the only boxers to win world titles at lightweight and super middleweight.

Being told that it can’t be done drives Crawford.

“Terence Crawford is the most competitive person I have ever met,” WBC lightweight champion Shakur Stevenson told ESPN. Stevenson has been friends with Crawford for nearly a decade and has seen firsthand who Crawford is in and out of the ring.

“Everything is a competition with him,” Stevenson said. “He feels like he can beat you at anything and he truly believes everything he says. I don’t understand how a human can be that competitive. It has to be a gift from God.”

That gift is what Crawford will take into the ring with him against Canelo, and he fully expects to leave Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas with four new championship belts to add to his collection. When Crawford speaks about a fight he’s in, it’s not a prediction; it’s a spoiler.

“Canelo’s fans are going to be crying on Sunday morning when I take his belts,” Crawford said.

CRAWFORD ADMITTEDLY OBSESSES over being the best at everything. He mostly avoids team sports because he is not solely responsible for the outcome. It’s the reason why he abandoned football as a teenager for boxing. If he has to rely on someone else to determine if he wins or loses, he’s not interested.

“When he has his mind set on something, he’s not going to lose,” welterweight Boubacar Sylla told ESPN. “He just doesn’t lose at much of anything. I tell him he’s cheating sometimes, but it really boils down to putting the work in and being competitive.”

“I just beat him at pingpong. But then he beat me three times after that. He’s a sore loser and he’ll make you play him 100 times until he wins. He won’t let you win at anything.”

Shakur Stevenson

Sylla helped “Bud” prepare for his junior welterweight unification fight with Viktor Postol in 2016 and has been a mainstay in each of his camps since then. He’s had a front-row seat to witness Crawford’s pursuit of greatness.

“I’ve never seen that man outright lose at anything,” Sylla said. “He never gets dominated in sparring or anything he does. He’s absolutely relentless.”

Stevenson and Sylla put extra emphasis on Crawford’s obsession with competing at everything imaginable.

“I just beat him at pingpong,” Stevenson said. “But then he beat me three times after that. He’s a sore loser and he’ll make you play him 100 times until he wins. He won’t let you win at anything.”

Sylla recalled some of the most ridiculous competitions that he has had with Crawford.

“He challenged me to a cook-off,” Sylla said. “Man, he challenged me to see who could sleep the longest one time. He won at that, too. He’ll challenge you to see who can walk the furthest. … Anything you challenge him to, he’s going to find a way to win. I ain’t seen nobody like him.”

SHAWN PORTER WAS on the receiving end of Crawford’s ruthless drive in a 2021 loss, and the two fighters have known each other since they were teenagers on the amateur circuit. Porter notes that Crawford ostracized himself from the other boxers during those days. In Porter’s opinion, making friends at that time might have lessened his competitive drive.

“Crawford was the only guy from Omaha on the amateurs [U.S. Olympic team], and he acted like he was the only guy from Omaha,” Porter told ESPN of a group of fighters that included Gary Russell Jr., Rau’shee Warren, Demetrius Andrade and Keith Thurman. “He was solo everywhere and always had a frown on his face. I guess that kind of heightened that chip on his shoulder coming from where he comes from and the hard upbringing that he had with his mom. He already had a chip on his shoulder, and then he manufactured another one.”

Crawford fell short in his bid to make the 2008 U.S. Olympic team when he lost to Sadam Ali in 2007. But Crawford was unbothered because he believed his in-ring style was built for the pro ranks and world championships, not for points fighting and Olympic medals.

When he debuted as a pro in 2008, he didn’t receive the hype that peers such as Adrien Broner and Russell had, which only heightened his ambition. After winning his first 19 fights — 15 by stoppage — Crawford entered the national spotlight in 2013 when he stepped in on three days’ notice to face Breidis Prescott for his first televised fight in the co-main event of Brandon Rios-Mike Alvarado 2 on HBO.

Crawford easily outpointed the bigger and allegedly stronger Prescott — something that Crawford routinely had to overcome in his biggest fights — and was hellbent on proving what he already thought: He was the best fighter in the world.

“All I needed was an opportunity,” Crawford said. “Nobody knew who I was before that, and I made their heads spin with how easily I beat Prescott. Everybody was like, ‘Damn, who is this dude?’ Now I needed to show them who I was.”

Crawford began his quest to capture world titles by trusting only his trainers Brian “BoMac” McIntyre, Jacqui “Red” Spikes, Esau “El Tuto” Dieguez, his close friends and training partners. Crawford looked at everyone outside of that circle as an enemy.

Porter found out how tough it was to be behind enemy lines. Even though they were friendly before and after they fought, Porter recalls how Crawford created an atmosphere of abhorrence heading into their 2021 clash.

During the inaugural news conference, Porter said that Crawford appeared to be offended by Porter’s attire — a vest with no shirt — and addressed it.

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“He made a joke and everyone laughed,” Porter said. “But I looked over at him and there’s this half smirk on his face and that’s when I realized that he was really trying not to like me. He didn’t want to like me, and I found that out the hard way.”

Crawford later said he was only interested in fighting Porter to prove a point that calling him out was a painful mistake.

“I never wanted to fight Shawn Porter,” Crawford said. “Not because I thought he could beat me but because we were friends who respected each other. But when he had the WBC title, he didn’t talk about fighting me.”

In the middle of this conversation, you can feel where the switch flips and Crawford takes it personally.

“I felt disrespected because I knew that [Porter’s promoter, Premier Boxing Champions] were just using me as a tool to gauge how a fight with [Errol] Spence and me would go,” he said. His voice takes a serious tone. “[I told Shawn], ‘They are using you as a pawn to see how well I would do against you compared to how you fought Spence.’ It was clear as day and in his face, but he insisted on fighting me. So I said, ‘OK, let’s do it.’

“And you saw what happened.”

Crawford knocked Porter out and sent him into retirement.

With every win, Crawford rose in popularity and in the pound-for-pound rankings. From becoming undisputed champion at junior welterweight by dispatching Thomas Dulorme, Postol and Julius Indongo to knocking off Jeff Horn and Spence to earn undisputed status at 147 pounds, Crawford began to earn the respect he believed he long deserved. However, despite receiving more love, he saw more enemies ahead.

“It’s like the more the world tried to accept him, the more he wanted this ‘me against the world’ narrative to exist,” Porter said. “He needs it. Once he has a chip on his shoulder, there is literally nothing you can do to get it off of him. Even if he knocks out Canelo and he gets all the love, he’ll look at everyone and say that they should have loved him earlier.”

AFTER RUNNING ROUGHSHOD over Spence in 2023, Crawford needed a new mountain to climb. But it couldn’t be an average mountain in the 147-pound division as he had already conquered the toughest challenge in the weight class in Spence. He needed a Mount Everest, something considered too daunting, even for him.

It initially appeared that Crawford would move up to 154 pounds and pursue a fight with then-undisputed champion Jermell Charlo. However, once Charlo lost to Canelo, that fight was no longer appealing to Crawford. After one fight at 154 pounds, a decision victory over Israil Madrimov, Crawford turned his attention to Canelo.

“I didn’t look much into it because of the weight difference,” Crawford said. “But once I started looking closer at him, I realized he wasn’t as big as everyone says he is.”

With the backing of boxing’s most powerful broker, Turki Alalshikh, the chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority, Crawford began to pursue a fight with Canelo. However, the more Canelo dismissed him as an option due to his size, the harder Crawford began to push for the fight. Crawford was ringside for Canelo’s September 2024 fight with Edgar Berlanga and went on Instagram Live with Alalshikh to call out the undisputed champion.

Once again, he had something to prove and put Canelo squarely in his crosshairs. His unrelenting thirst for competition was at it again.

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“Most of us have an on and off switch, and if you stay on too long, you burn yourself out,” Porter said. “Bud doesn’t have an off switch. It’s incredible to see how he manages to stay turned on without needing a break.”

Aside from his competitive nature, Crawford is also extraordinarily well-prepared for his fights. He takes tremendous care of his body and obsesses over the tiniest of details. And although he’s a very athletic switch-hitter and remarkably strong, Crawford has never relied solely on his physical attributes to win fights.

“Every minute of a fight, he’s trying to make a statement,” said Ray Beltran, who lost a one-sided decision to Crawford but is one of only three opponents to go the distance with him since 2014. “He’s a special fighter, but you don’t realize it until you are in the ring with him. He controls every aspect of the fight and is always one step ahead of you. From the way he cuts angles to his underrated footwork, he does just about everything perfectly. He’s the closest thing to [Floyd] Mayweather that I have seen but he is a lot more dangerous.”

Beltran keeps tabs on his former opponent since they fought and suggests that Crawford’s hunger for greatness, extraordinary boxing IQ and insatiable appetite for destruction will be the reason he pulls off the upset against Canelo.

“Crawford isn’t going to come into the ring like a challenger because he fights like a hungry champion who is after legacy, not money,” Beltran said. “Canelo doesn’t fight with that same hunger anymore. He may have fought bigger and stronger fighters but nobody with the skill, talent and hunger that Crawford has.”

Heading into his fight with Canelo, Crawford truly believes the deck is once again stacked against him. Aside from the weight difference, Crawford is a +140 underdog, according to ESPN BET.

Crawford fully expects to be in enemy territory at Allegiant Stadium on Mexican Independence Day weekend.

“I have his people going against me and my own people going against me,” Crawford said. “Some people just don’t want to see you rise and pray for your downfall. That’s what fuels me. I have supporters but I just hear the haters more.”

Canelo has routinely downplayed Crawford as a “great” fighter who has yet to face an “elite” opponent. Of course, Canelo identifies himself as “elite.” And that’s all Crawford needed to hear to make an enemy out of someone who doubts him.

Now Crawford has a point to prove, but how will he beat Canelo?

“Canelo lost before, so he understands how to lose. I don’t.”