By: Sean Crose
Many expected him to win the fight, but no one expected the man to win in such an astonishingly one-sided manner. Still, there he was, making easy work of WBC, WBA and IBF welterweight champion Errol Spence last July, not only dominating his man, but almost literally beating Spence to a pulp. Indeed, it was a crowning performance for 39-0 WBO welterweight champion Terence Crawford, a performance that had been a long time coming. “I worked hard to get to where I am today,” Crawford, the newly crowned undisputed welterweight champion, said at the post-fight press conference.
Those words can apply today as well as they did that night last summer, because Crawford is now Boxing Insider’s 2023 Fighter of the Year, an honor he “worked his butt off” for. The truth is that Crawford had some tough competition before being crowned the best of 2023, that competition came in the form of a certain undisputed junior featherweight world champion named Naoya Inoue. Make no mistake: choosing between Nebraska’s Crawford and Japan’s Inoue was no easy task. After all, both men devastated the competition last year, Crawford by crushing Spence and Inoue by demolishing Marlon Tapales and Stephen Fulton, both top competitors.
However, what allowed Crawford to earn the top spot was the magnitude of his victory over Spence, as well as those naysayers who claimed he wouldn’t win it. Nayoa won his second undisputed world championship last year (that’s right, the guy actually accomplished the monumental task of winning two), but his dominance has rarely, if ever, been in doubt. However, the winner of the long-awaited Crawford-Spence match was never clear… at least not until Crawford took complete control after taking down Spence in the second. When the fight was stopped in the ninth, the outcome of the fight had gone from a question mark to a foregone conclusion.
Now there’s no one around to deny that Spence is one of the all-time greats in an all-time great division (oh, there will always be someone out there denying someone else’s greatness, but Crawford’s bona fides are no longer in doubt). . There have been some big names at welterweight: Robinson, Leonard, Hears, Mayweather and Pacquiao, to name just a few. And now Crawford’s name is on that list. Dear company, without a doubt. And reason enough for Crawford to be crowned the 2023 Fighter of the Year.
