Terence ‘Bud’ Crawford, America’s finest boxer since Floyd Mayweather Jr, has spent his life closing the distance between the improbable and the inevitable. He was the kid from North Omaha who survived a bullet to the head and poured himself into neighborhood gym. He was the stubborn amateur who missed the Olympics but kept showing up in dingy basements until the craft became second nature. He was the icy technician and ruthless finisher, denied opportunities against name-brand fighters for most of his career, who unified the fractured world championship at 140lb, then did it again at 147 by dismantling Errol Spence Jr so comprehensively that it felt like a curtain being ripped back. Here, at last, was the full measure of the quiet man’s design.
Now, at 37, undefeated in 41 professional fights with 31 wins by knockout, he’s arrived at boxing’s biggest stage yet. On Saturday night, beneath the fluorescent dome of Allegiant Stadium, Crawford will climb two weight classes to face Saúl ‘Canelo’ Álvarez for the undisputed super-middleweight crown. More than 70,000 fans are expected – the largest boxing crowd in Las Vegas history by more than double – in a $2bn football coliseum better known as the home of the NFL’s Raiders. Netflix will beam the spectacle to hundreds of millions of subscribers around the world at no extra cost, the first time a fight of this magnitude has bypassed the pay-per-view model that defined the sport for decades.
Quick Guide
Canelo Álvarez v Terence Crawford
Show
What’s happening?
Terence Crawford, the undefeated four-division world champion from 135lb to 154lb, is moving up two weight classes to challenge for Saúl ‘Canelo’ Álvarez’s undisputed championship at 168lb.
Where and when is the fight?
The scheduled 12-round bout will take place on Saturday night at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, home of the NFL’s Raiders, which is expected to be configured for about 71,835 spectators. It will almost certainly shatter the previous Las Vegas attendance record for boxing: the 29,214 who turned up for the 1982 fight between Larry Holmes and Gerry Cooney at a purpose-built outdoor arena in the Caesars Palace parking lot.
The main card begins at 9pm ET (2am BST on Sunday), with Álvarez and Crawford not expected to make their ringwalks until after 12am ET (5am BST).
What belts are on the line?
Álvarez’s undisputed crown at 168lb is at stake: the WBA, WBC, IBF and WBO titles all on the line. Crawford keeps his WBA belt at 154lb whatever happens.
Where can I watch it?
For the first time in boxing history, a fight of this magnitude will be streamed live globally on Netflix at no additional cost to subscribers. The stream begins at 9pm ET, with undercard bouts leading into the main event.
Netflix will offer commentary feeds in English and Spanish. Unlike traditional pay-per-view – which often costs US fans around $90 – this one is included in a standard subscription.
Who else is fighting?
The first six undercard bouts not carried by the Netflix stream will be available free on Tudum starting at 5.30pm ET (10.30pm BST). The entire order of play is as follows:
Preliminary card (Tudum, from 5.30pm ET/10.30pm BST)
• Serhii Bohachuk v Brandon Adams, 10 rounds, middleweights
• Ivan Dychko v Jermaine Franklin Jr, 10 rounds, heavyweights
• Reito Tsutsumi v Javier Martinez, six rounds, super featherweights
• Sultan Almohamed v Martin Caraballo, four rounds, super lightweights
• Steven Nelson v Raiko Santana, 10 rounds, light heavyweights
• Marco Verde v Sona Akale, six rounds, 162lb catchweight
Main card (Netflix, from 8pm ET/1am BST on Sunday)
• Callum Walsh v Fernando Vargas Jr, 10 rounds, junior middleweights
• Christian Mbilli v Lester Martinez, 12 rounds, super middleweights
• Mohammed Alakel v John Ornelas, 10 rounds, lightweights
• Canelo Álvarez v Terence Crawford, 12 rounds, for Alvarez’s undisputed super middleweight championship
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The timing is no accident: Mexican Independence Day weekend, with mariachis spilling on to the Strip, tri-color flags draped over shoulders and tequila bottles raised skyward. For Álvarez, boxing’s biggest star for a decade, it is a ritual homecoming in his adopted city. For Crawford, it is an incursion into hostile territory. “Of course it’s going to be a pro-Canelo crowd,” he said Wednesday. “Vegas is like a second home for him. I’m looking forward to being an underdog. I’m already prepared for that.”
This is the fight game at its most extravagant: Turki al-Sheikh’s bottomless bankroll, Dana White’s fledgling Zuffa Boxing badge, the concerts and star-studded trimmings that stretch a bout into a week-long spectacle. It has been dressed up to look like a Super Bowl. Strip that away and the intrigue is stark: one man bigger, entrenched, defending his patch; the other smaller, older but perhaps sharper, daring to outwit physics itself.
Terence Crawford, above, has captured world titles in four divisions from 135lb through 154lb. Now he’s scaling two weight classes for a crack at Canelo Álvarez’s undisputed championship at 168lb. Photograph: Mark Robinson/Matchroom Boxing/Getty Images
Álvarez, 35, is the red-headed emperor of 168lb, granite-chinned and battle-tested, a four-division champion from 154 through 175 who has turned back future Hall of Famers and critics since turning pro as a 15-year-old in Guadalajara. He is the sport’s most bankable world champion, its stadium act. Crawford is the interloper from a boxing backwater, the scalpel daring the anvil, your favorite boxer’s favorite boxer. A four-weight champion from 135 to 154, the Nebraskan problem-solver has made elite fighters look ordinary for more than a decade.
It is the kind of leap that recalls the folklore of Henry Armstrong, Harry Greb, Mickey Walker, Sugar Ray Robinson and Manny Pacquiao – fighters who treated dramatic weight-jumps as just another opponent to be outsmarted. That is the lineage Crawford wants to join, the reason he accepted a challenge that most analysts consider a bridge too far. One that didn’t even seem plausible until Al-Sheikh’s bottomless coffers entered the frame. “I think people [are] underestimating everything about me,” Crawford said, his voice even. “But that doesn’t matter. We gotta fight Saturday, and all the answers will be answered that night.”
He has been asked all week about size, odds, decline curves. He brushes it away. “Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion [but] they can’t fight for me. I’ve been doubted my whole career. I was told I needed to get another job because I wasn’t going to be world champion. I just feel like, OK, well, just watch me do it.” Asked what to expect, Crawford kept it spare: “A victory. Be victorious. Then everybody going to be talking about it on Sunday.”
Omaha beginnings
Long before Allegiant Stadium, Crawford’s stage was a cramped, honest room on North 33rd Street, Omaha. Born in 1987, he grew up on Larimore Avenue, a neighborhood where trouble was close and options thin. His father’s Navy deployments left his mother, Debra, to raise him and his sisters. She practiced a brand of tough love so extreme it became legend: Crawford has said she once tried to pay neighborhood kids to beat him up, just to harden him. None of them succeeded.
He had the energy to match the streets. He was expelled from schools, bounced from classrooms, looked like a story heading the wrong way until Carl Washington, a neighbor who ran the eponymous CW Boxing Club, coaxed seven-year-old Terence through the door. The place was small, loud and raw. It gave him a code. Keep your chin tucked. Hands up. Elbows in. Keep your word. Boxing became identity.
Terence Crawford as a child in Omaha, Nebraska. Photograph: Top Rank
By his teens, he was fiddling with the sport as if it were a lock to be picked. He’d switch stances from orthodox to southpaw just to see how it felt. When he broke his right hand in a school fight, he kept showing up for training anyway, drilling left-handed until it felt natural. The curiosity wasn’t cosmetic; it became the foundation of a style. Around him, Omaha produced mentors who still travel with him: Brian ‘BoMac’ McIntyre, Esaú Diéguez, Jamie Belt. BoMac set strategy, Diéguez sanded edges, Belt swapped long miles for intervals and strength, the modern program stitched to an old-world ethic: show up, shut up, do it again tomorrow.
As an amateur he fought more than 70 times, beating future champions like Mikey and Danny Garcia. He missed the 2008 Olympics in the trials and turned professional at the age of 20 with little fanfare, four-rounders on undercards for meager purses. He kept at it. The lessons were prosaic, the kind that don’t trend or rack up views: be early, be fit, be watchful. And he never entirely left home. Even now, between the victory parades thrown in his honor, the street that bears his name and the nonprofit B&B Boxing Academy he co-founded for at-risk kids, Omaha remains his center of gravity, the place where he’s raising his seven children. For the big fights he decamps to the altitude and quiet of Colorado Springs, but the spiritual map doesn’t change.
That civic pride produced an unlikely ally. Before a fight in 2014, a visitor slipped into his locker room: Warren Buffett. The Berkshire Hathaway chairman became one of Crawford’s most enthusiastic fans, sometimes choosing seats high in the bowl instead of ringside for a cleaner sightline. He once compared Crawford to a savvy investor: “He uses the first four or five rounds to fully size up the target and then expertly uses that knowledge to score decisive victories.” Crawford laughs that thrift is their biggest shared trait. Even on seven-figure nights, friends say, he’ll want his $40 change from a $100 bill at the petrol pump. The millionaire’s parable sits neatly alongside the billionaire’s bungalow on Farnam Street: two faces of the same city, both suspicious of fuss.
The bullet that missed
Every big fight week invites a creation myth. Crawford’s never needed much embellishment. In September 2008, 21 years old with four pro fights and still existing on the sport’s margins, he left a dice game in Omaha, climbed into his ‘86 Cutlass and started counting his winnings. That’s when a nine-millimeter round tore through the rear glass and kissed the right side of Crawford’s head below the ear. A fraction of angle spared his life.
He drove himself to the hospital, bloodied and furious at the universe and at himself. Five hours later he was stitched and released. Less than two months after that, he fought again and stopped his opponent in two. If the movies wrote it, the revelation would arrive complete by sunrise. Real life works differently. “When I got shot, it changed my life tremendously,” he has said. He pared his circle and then pared it again, traded half-idle hours for gym hours, swapped the performance of toughness for the private work it actually requires. It wasn’t epiphany so much as accretion: fewer late nights, more early ones, a tighter trust.
Journalists still ask about it because it sounds like fate. This week he was asked by the Guardian if anything still lingers from that night. Crawford’s reply was the cleanest line in the room: “Not at all.” He doesn’t mythologize, doesn’t sermonize. The Netflix docuseries promoting Saturday’s fight had to fall back on archival footage when addressing the episode. To him it is what everything else is: a fact, then a choice. The scar is real; the work that followed is the more interesting part.
The temptation is to oversell the hinge. But if the bullet provided the jolt, the gym provided the map. The road from that car to this stadium ran through a thousand forgotten rounds in quiet rooms, bags thumping like a metronome, feet learning to solve angles the way a chess player navigates endgames. It ran through the places the cameras never go. And it ran back through Omaha, always Omaha, the one constant in a sport built on dislocation.
When the questions Wednesday turned to legacy – the heavy stuff, the first-ballot talk – he trimmed the subject to size. “I definitely think about it,” he said. “But I’m keeping myself focused on the job at hand, because I don’t want to eat before my food is ready.”
Building greatness
Read the arc since that night and it looks like a CV written for a wall display in Canastota. In 2014, Crawford went to Glasgow and outboxed Ricky Burns for his first world title, the first world champion from Nebraska in nearly a century. Back in Omaha, he floored Olympic gold medalist Yuriorkis Gamboa four times in a career-defining performance. At 140lb he hoovered up every belt on offer, folding Julius Indongo with a left to the body to become the first undisputed champion of the four-belt era at that weight.
Welterweight offered sterner challenges but no greater resistance. He relieved Jeff Horn of his title with calm efficiency; punished José Benavidez Jr; took apart Kell Brook. The peak came in July 2023, when he met Errol Spence Jr – a fellow unbeaten champion many considered his equal in what was billed as the best fight boxing could deliver – and unstitched him with clinical cruelty, scoring three knockdowns and closing the show inside nine rounds. For the first time in the modern era, one man held all four belts in two divisions. The following year, debuting at 154lb, he outlasted Israil Madrimov, becoming a champion in a fourth weight class.
Terence Crawford celebrates after winning his first world title with a 12-round unanimous decision over Ricky Burns at Glasgow’s Exhibition and Conference Centre in March 2014. Photograph: Mark Runnacles/Getty Images
What makes it possible is less romance than ringcraft. Crawford is a chameleon. He spends the early rounds downloading the other man’s operating system, switching from orthodox to southpaw, tapping with the jab, cataloguing reactions. Then he flips the geometry. Distance shrinks, angles tilt, timing collapses. The fight that appeared to look competitive in round three looks organized in round six and inevitable by round nine. These have been his drowning rounds, the deep waters where opponents are beset by a riptide that can’t be bargained with.
Mayweather’s genius was denial, a refusal to provide openings. Crawford’s is invention. He manufactures openings through opponents’ hesitation, then punishes them. “I’ve been doing this since I was seven years old,” he said when the subject of adjustments came up. “Once I get in there, I make my adjustments on the fly, and we’re going to go from there.” The sentence is almost aggressively plain. It suits him. He is not a talker of big theory or big feeling. He is a worker of small margins.
Crawford is a quiet, laconic personalty who has never been terribly interested in self-marketing, preferring to let his accomplishments speak for themselves. As Mayweather learned during the long decade before his mid-career pivot from the white-hat Pretty Boy Floyd into a pantomime villain made him the world’s richest athlete, today’s culture doesn’t reward the unassuming, respectful types. A win on Saturday would not only be a testament Crawford’s abilities, but become a sort of validation for doing it his way and on his terms.
The week has brought its brambles. A viral photograph of his ripped physique drew a line from Álvarez about muscles not mattering. Another question dredged up his post-Madrimov form. Crawford’s reply was needle-point, not a rant: “We’re not going to talk about the past. [Álvarez’s last fight against William Scull] wasn’t spectacular either. If you’re going to talk about my last performance, let’s talk about his last performance as well.” When an old clip about being “70% sure” resurfaced, he didn’t blink. “I’m 1,000% sure now.”
Terence Crawford, left, lands a blow on Australia’s Jeff Horn in their WBO welterweight title fight at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in June 2018. Photograph: Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images
Through it all, Omaha hums in the background. He still runs the B&B Boxing Academy for kids who need structure more than slogans. He still sees himself not as a role model – the term makes him wary – but as an example. And the Buffett kinship endures, a local odd couple whose logic improves the more you think about it. A billionaire who lives in the same modest house he bought in 1958; a fighter who still counts his change: thrift as worldview, patience as weapon.
As for those who doubt the jump to 168? “Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion,” he said. “It doesn’t move me. I’ve been doubted my whole career.” Then the simple, unblinking kicker: “Just watch me do it.”
Once in a lifetime
So to Saturday. On paper, Canelo is the naturally bigger man, compact as a Brinks truck at 168, with a chin that has banked heavy-handed receipts all the way up to light-heavyweight. He thrives at mid-range, where his counter hooks feel like invoices, while his blend of hand speed, punch variety and a slick defense flows from deft footwork to superior upper body movement. Crawford will need several answers at once: pace that denies Canelo his breathers; angles that unsettle his set feet; a jab that stings rather than measures; body work that ages the bigger man half a round at a time.
The risk is clean, the arithmetic obvious. Crawford has lived most of his prime at 147, made only a brief reconnaissance at 154, now arrives at 168. Mass is real; so is one of boxing’s oldest chestnuts: A good big ’un will beat a good little ’un. The first time Crawford is hit cleanly by Canelo will be the hardest he’s ever been hit in his life.
But you do not become an all-timer by managing expectations. You become one by leaning into them. Crawford’s upside is cartoonish. In almost every fight he’s been in, he’s been dominant. He has already done what no male fighter of the four-belt era had done before him: become undisputed in two divisions. Add a third against Canelo, in a football stadium on a subscription service that may deliver the sport’s largest single-night audience, and he moves from generational great to all-time company. The typically breathless promotional hype, including the ‘Once In A Lifetime’ tagline screaming from every poster, almost rings true.
Canelo’s side of the equation is simpler. Another defense at 168 would be legacy maintenance: a first-ballot Hall of Famer adding another impeccable plaque to his wall. Crawford gave the subject its due without false bravado. “I don’t think losing tarnish me or Canelo,” he said. “I think Canelo is a first-ballot Hall of Famer … and I think that I’m a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Whether win, lose or draw, both of us going in the Hall of Fame.” The next sentence brought it back to task: “I’m definitely going to win. I’m winning this fight for sure.”
Canelo Álvarez, left, and Terence Crawford pose for media in the run-up to their title fight. Photograph: Chris Unger/TKO Worldwide LLC/Zuffa LLC
There are always side stories. Trump surrogate Dana White’s entry into boxing. Al-Sheikh’s biggest stateside splash to date. The newness of Netflix in a sport that has spent decades charging viewers to watch around a living-room huddle. Crawford acknowledged the shift without puffing his chest. “Back in the day, the megafights, they was fighting on regular TV,” he said. “So it’s great to be on Netflix, for people that don’t have cable to witness a fight like this.”
Say nothing of the crowd on site. Saturday’s fight will easily surpass the record for a boxing crowd in Las Vegas, set in 1982 when 29,214 watched Larry Holmes batter Gerry Cooney in a temporary stadium built in the Caesars Palace parking lot. Crawford insisted on Wednesday he’s looking forward to being underestimated by a stadium that will roar for the popular Mexican. His whole career has been one long exercise in removing the other man’s excuses. The question on Saturday is whether that genius can erase not just tactics but poundage and precedent.
“Don’t eat before my food is ready,” Crawford said, smiling at his own proverb. If you want the less poetic version, he’d already given it earlier in the week: “A victory.” The dice game is long over. The Cutlass is gone. The scar remains. Terence Crawford is still climbing, still solving, still fighting. And under the brightest lights at the bottom of the Las Vegas Strip he will try to carve his way through the last door he has left: the one marked immortality.
