If you required me to reduce this story to 15 words or less, here’s the way I would put it:
Not enough people want to see Terence Crawford. So he’s playing the race card.
I’ve been around the boxing business a long time. And in this industry, I doubt there’s a more Trump-hating liberal New Yorker than Bob Arum, the 90-year-old head of Top Rank, who got his start as a tax attorney in the Justice Department during the Kennedy administration.
Crawford Files Lawsuit Against Top Rank
But according to a lawsuit filed by Crawford against Top Rank, Arum’s bonafides as a left-winger are, well, fraudulent, as it asserts that Arum has a “sordid past: when it comes to athletes of color, and that he “continues to make racist and bigoted statements and purposefully damage the reputations of Black boxers.”
Well, I don’t know many, if any, people in boxing who have seen genuine evidence of such a thing, and Arum is, of course, greatly offended by it, calling Crawford’s legal action a “malicious extortion attempt.”
Crawford, the WBO welterweight champion, is seeking $5.4 million worth of damages, and one of the things he cites is Top Rank’s alleged inability to deliver a fight with WBC-IBF champ Errol Spence Jr., a fight of real substance but not necessarily one that crosses over to the general public in a big way.
Crawford has made the claim that Arum “spoke out regularly” against him, with intent to injure. Well, I don’t really know what Arum’s intent was, but when discussions with the Crawford became contentious, he was quoted as saying, “I could build a house in Beverly Hills on the money I’ve lost on him (Crawford) in the last three fights.”
And he may be right about that. In the three pay-per-view fights he’s had, Crawford has, by all accounts, underperformed to a degree that he puts himself in no position to make a lot of demands. Those fights, against Viktor Postol, Amir Khan and Shaun Porter, have drawn a reported total of 310,000 subscribers.
Crawford Not Drawing Big Numbers
It was the last one that probably triggered the most animosity. Arum was putting Crawford, considered by many to be the #1 pound-for-pound fighter in the world, into perhaps his biggest career challenge, against Shaun Porter, who is not by any means unknown to TV audiences. Arum predicted that the bout would do at least 500,000 subscribers, and perhaps up to a million and a half.
It did 135,000, according to most of the published reports. And Crawford blamed it on the fact that the fight was carried on an app – ESPN+ (Plus). But you know, the UFC has been doing business over that app as well, and they did over a million buys on at least two fight cards.
One of the problems is that even though fighters get exposed to the business side of the sport, most of them don’t have a realistic idea of how to calculate their own value. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Crawford was saying to himself something like, “Hey, Jake Paul is making all this money, and he’s not even a fighter. I’ve got a belt. I’m #1 pound-for-pound. I should be making a lot more than him.”
And Crawford IS making money; it’s been written that he made $6 million for the Porter fight. He just wants to know why he isn’t making much more than that. And the answer is that to make more money, you have to put more asses in seats. And he doesn’t do that in proportion to his position in the pound-for-pound pantheon (excuse the alliteration).
And because of that, does it make sense to keep paying him big money, and going forward, what he’s looking for?
Apparently the people from Al Haymon’s organization – Premier Boxing Champions – don’t think so. They control the promotional rights for Spence. Haymon doesn’t speak to the press, so we’ll have to go by what his spokesman has to say. Tim Smith is a former New York Daily News reporter who is now PBC’s vice president for communications. He went on a podcast where he asserted – strongly – that Crawford’s demand for a Spence fight don’t match up with his actual value.
“You’ve got to look at what he’s done in the pay-per-view fights that he’s been involved in,” said Smith, citing those low numbers we quoted earlier in this piece.
Smith has an understanding that while Spence-Crawford might be something that diehards may want to see very badly, those people don’t usually constitute the buying public, and in fact, many of them want to, in his words, “steal the fight” from somewhere, Spence, who’s had better pay-per-view numbers than Crawford, wants 60% of the pot, but Crawford says he’ll refuse to make the fight unless HE gets the 60%.
And that, my friends, is called an impasse.
Smith seemed to choose his other words carefully, pointing out that Crawford hasn’t “been built” into a PPV star. And maybe that’s a little commentary about Top Rank. Just how much of an individual’s drawing power is the responsibility of his promoter to create? And how much falls to the fighter, who, truth be told, is an independent contractor and his own “brand,” if you will, when it comes down to it?
If this lawsuit ever gets to the next step, that may be a very important point of deliberation.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Arum and Top Rank went down a road that had some similarity to this regarding Floyd Mayweather Jr. There was a time when Arum did not believe he could make money with Mayweather. I attended one of Mayweather’s title defenses in his hometown of Grand Rapids where he didn’t even come close to selling out the arena.
Then in 2006, Mayweather exercised a clause in his contract and bought out Top Rank for $750,000. As they say, the rest is history, as Mayweather re-invented himself and became more or less his own promoter.
The question is, does Crawford have the capacity to create something that wasn’t there before?
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