Another year has flown by, and things are still there – the long-awaited fight for the title of absolute welterweight champion between the Americans Terence Crawford (39-0, 30 KOs) and Errol Spence (28-0, 22 KOs) is slowly starting to overripe, and the chances of organizing it less and less, as the mandatory contenders are already waiting.
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commented boss Showtime Sports Steven Espinosa: “It’s complicated by the presence of mandatory applicants. I know that both sides want to organize this fight. But I also know that both sides do not want a repeat of last year’s experience – when a lot of time was wasted, and negotiations moved at a snail’s pace. We need a different dynamic. We need to make sure that this time everything is much more productive. The parties should not count on a deal that will satisfy everyone 100%. That doesn’t happen. There is this old joke: a good deal is when both parties are unhappy. You don’t have to chase the perfect deal. She won’t. Let’s be satisfied with the best we have.”
Espinosa did a very controversial thing – he openly blamed Crawford for the breakdown in negotiations: “Terence surprised me with stubbornness in minor issues and feedback – each time we lost a lot of time waiting for his answer. I think he will have his own version of what happened. He complained that they wanted to make him the first fighter to fight without a fixed fee. But this is nonsense. Before him, many entered the ring without a fixed fee, including Gervonta Davis and Floyd Mayweather. Another problem is his demand for financial transparency. But after all, every time after each event we report on where and how much money was spent. In fact, he wanted something more – he wanted to control costs. And this is already a problem. After all, this is how you can randomly poke a finger at any line of expenses and declare that this figure is too high. So you can disrupt the negotiations at any time. So you can spend a lot of money on the promotion of the fight, which will fail 2 weeks before the fighters enter the ring.
“Understand that we have had negative experiences with cases like this,” Espinosa explains. – Remember the megafight Floyd Mayweather vs Manny Pacquiao. Ticket sales started 10 days before the fight. It was terrible. And the reason was exactly the same – both sides wanted to control all costs. Understand that in such a situation, you must first agree on the terms. That is, to agree on what will happen next if one of the parties does not agree with the proposed figures. How to get out of this situation? Then we were lucky. The hype was so huge that the tickets sold out despite their high cost. But the situation itself was dire and too risky. You will laugh at such a proposal, but sometimes the best thing is to just close the fighters and their teams in the office for 8-10 hours. And if they don’t agree during this time, then just forget about all this and let go.
The other day, former world champion Timothy Bradley said: “It is obvious that Spence continues to run from Crawford.” But it is possible that this superfight will never take place. Sean Porter advises not to rush.
