A disgruntled Terence Crawford today vented his frustration over the loss of huge man Canelo Alvarez.

Crawford believes unified super middleweight champion Canelo (61-2-2, 39 KOs) doesn’t want to fight him because he fears for his legacy if he loses. He would look bad in front of his fans if he was defeated by someone flashier who started his career at 135.

Canelo’s Financial Demands

His Excellency Turki Alalshikh decided that he did not want to continue trying to make a fight between Canelo and Crawford because the Mexican star was asking for a lot of money. The fight was set at $150 million, the amount Canelo was asking for.

From Canelo’s perspective, when you hear that Tyson Fury was paid more than $100 million to fight Oleksandr Usyk in their first fight last May and likely significantly more for the rematch on December 21, the $150 million that Canelo is asking for doesn’t seem irrational.

It is Turki Alalshikha’s prerogative not to pay Canelo the requested price for the Crawford fight, but one can understand why he is asking for such a sum. Canelo-Crawford is a much bigger fight in the US than Fury-Usyk. But if Turki really wants Canelo vs. Crawford, he will pay him.

Impact of Crawford’s Recent Results

We don’t know if Turki has scrapped plans for a fight between the two because of Crawford’s unimpressive win over WBA junior middleweight champion Israil Madrimov last Saturday night in Los Angeles, where Crawford narrowly won a fight against a fighter who lacked Canelo’s power, attack and talent.

Crawford’s reaction time to punches seemed snail-paced. He took a lot of tough punches, and his power wasn’t at 154. His punches were in the lower 147-pound spectrum. So if Crawford can’t punch at 154, he’ll have trouble at 168.

Crawford getting beaten by Canelo won’t stop Turki from fighting because the fight would have happened anyway. However, when Canelo wipes out Crawford, the fans will be furious and feel cheated.

Who are they going to blame? The guy who organized the fight, Turki. Now he knows Crawford has no chance against Canelo. So it makes sense for him to back out of trying to make that fight.

“That was my motivation,” Terence Crawford said on Sean Zittel’s show Youtube channel about how Canelo Alvarez got motivated to continue his career after his victory over Israil Madramimov last Saturday night.

Crawford said his motivation was to fight Canelo after the Madrimov fight, but that is no longer possible and he is not content.

“It’s crazy and it makes me laugh when Canelo says in the media that he won’t get any credit,” but Canelo fought smaller fighters his entire career as Crawford.

Canelo with little advantage

It’s unclear whether Crawford is pretending not to understand Canelo’s reasons for not fighting him. If so, Canelo will not receive credit for the win and will be vilified by the entire promotion.

If Crawford is a little competitive, he comes out as the hero, while Canelo gets knocked down. You don’t hear Crawford saying he wants to fight lightweights like Gervonta Davis and Shakur Stevenson because he knows the boxing public would laugh at him if he tried to fight those guys. They’re a lot smaller.

It is not true that Canelo has fought smaller guys throughout his career. Here are some examples of Canelo’s fights with bigger guys:

– Dmitry Bivol
– Sergei Kovalev
-Jaime Munguia
-James Kirkland

“Canelo has been creating his own soft-weight division for years. He’s fought the smaller Mayweather,” Crawford said. “Canelo’s fought the smaller Amir Khan and Jermel Charlo. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t made as much money as all those guys, except Mayweather. Even Berlanga now, like he would against me, and he still has a lot of excuses for why he doesn’t want to fight me.”

Crawford was bigger than many of his opponents when he fought at 135 and 140. He was always bigger than his opponents in those two weight classes and used his size. Crawford is an A-1 hypocrite when he says Canelo has fought smaller guys his entire career when he himself did the same thing.

“When it comes to business, you’re doing good business. I heard him say I was simple work. If I was simple, you’d take all the money he [Turki Alalshikh] offers you, but he wants $200 million to fight Benavidez and $150 million to fight me,” Crawford said.

If His Excellency won’t give Canelo the $150 million he allegedly asked for, you can’t blame him for not wanting to fight Crawford. He thinks the fight is worth that much. If Turki doesn’t want to pay, that’s his business. Instead of getting mad at Canelo, Crawford should ask Turki why he didn’t want to put up the money for the fight.

“It just lets me know that I’m a threat to him. I’m a threat to him and a threat to his legacy, because it would be crazy for a guy [Crawford] it started at 135 and went up to your weight [168]. Your weight, not your final weight, no, none of that, and I’ll dethrone you,” Crawford said.

Canelo doesn’t see Crawford as a threat to his legacy because he’s too delicate and not robust enough to fight a fighter as robust as he is. For Crawford to have a chance against Canelo, he would need the size and strength of Gennady Golovkin. He doesn’t have that. He’s feeble and not adolescent, he turns 37 in September.

“So he has it in the back of his mind. “This guy [Crawford talking in the third person]”First of all, he’s tough. Second of all, he’s a boxer. He moves, he can punch, he can do everything. I can’t slip up and lose to this little guy. What are my fans going to think of me? What are my Mexican fans going to think of me?'” Crawford said of Canelo.

It’s a no-win situation for Canelo to fight an aging 154-pounder like Crawford, who came off a needy performance in a fight many fans thought he lost to Madrimov. That’s probably Canelo’s fear. It’s a no-win situation for Canelo, just like if Crawford decided to fight super bantamweight Naoya Inoue.

“It’s a huge risk for him, like he said. There’s nothing in it. None of these guys were the best pound-for-pound fighters in the world that he fought when they came up in weight. None of these guys,” Crawford said.

Being a so-called pound-for-pound fighter doesn’t mean anything in terms of money. If Crawford wants to call himself a pound-for-pound fighter, that’s great, but he’s not attractive and he’s not a huge PPV attraction.

The only people who follow pound-for-pound rankings are ultra-hardcore fansAverage fans don’t look at these ratings to decide whether to buy a fight on PPV.

“He wasn’t getting the guaranteed amount of money that was thrown at him for those guys that he’s getting against me,” Crawford said of Canelo’s previous fights. “That shows a level of respect. I look at it as respect that he shows me. I don’t look at it as disrespect.”

This shows that Canelo has a price he is asking for and His Excellency is clearly not interested in paying him the amount he wants. With an estimated net worth of $250 million, Canelo now has enough money to ask for a price for a specific fight. If he doesn’t get it, it’s not a huge deal because he has a lot of other fighters he can fight and still make good money.

Canelo’s Perception of Crawford

“I take that as the level of respect he has for me as a fighter. Right now, I’m still doing what I’m doing,” Crawford said when asked if he would retire and leave the game rather than stay.

Canelo probably sees Crawford as an aging, smaller fighter with a lifeless Mayweather-like fighting style looking for golden parachute payday that will assist him survive his retirement years. Alvarez said he saw Madrimov as the true winner of their fight.

He believes Crawford should have lost the fight to Madrimov, as do many boxing fans. It doesn’t assist that Canelo fights Crawford, who won controversially.