The first of two scheduled press conferences for the summer blockbuster Showtime pay-per-view fight between the WBA, WBC, and IBF welterweight world champion, Errol Spence Jr., and WBO welterweight world champion, Terence Crawford, took place today at the Beverly Hills Hilton, in Beverly Hill, California. Seeing the two together for the first time signals the fight is happening on July 29th was yet another time boxing got something right in 2023, a year that has delivered all of the best fights so far, minus Tyson Fury versus Oleksandr Usyk.
Spence Jr. spoke for the first time about the fight publicly at the press conference as he had limited availability before and after the event.
"This is the biggest fight [I feel can be made] in boxing right now," said Errol Spence Jr. at the press conference in Los Angeles, California. "This definitely an old-school fight, this is the type of [fight] my dad used to talk to me about, and older people would tell me about. Where you had 'Sugar' Ray Leonard versus Tommy Hearns...De La Hoya-Trinidad, you had the best fighting the best."
The fight which was originally set or should we say hoped for October or November 2022 is now a good roughly nine months later as Spence Jr confirmed that it was a phone call between the two fighters that made the fight happen. Whatever was said on the call, advanced the fight beyond the place it was at previously - and now we have a fight to see who is the best welterweight since Floyd Mayweather in the modern era.
Spence has even launched an apparel line playing up the humorous jabs he has taken at Terence Crawford. Spence Jr. has dawned the moniker of being 'The Big Fish', and uses an animated cartoon character that looks a lot like the animated series 'Street Sharks' from the early 90s to poke fun at Crawford. In closing, Spence Jr took one final jab letting it be known that he will continue his one-liners. Spence Jr even took a phase from popular drill rap culture using the 'smoking on' terminology which has been used as a form of disrespect to someone who has recently passed away as Spence Jr. has launched a 'smoking on bud' t-shirt and doubled down today saying that he will smoke Spence.
"We going to have a crawfish boil," said Spence as he played with Crawford's last name, referring to him as a popular sea creature people often eat. "We going to roll him up and smoke him in Vegas."
