By Kenneth Friedman
BOB Arum believes he has a way of putting together the long-anticipated fight between WBO welterweight champion Terence ‘Bud’ Crawford and WBA champ Manny ‘Pacman’ Pacquiao after the current crisis ends. Top Rank promoter Arum says Pacquiao (62-7-2, 39 KOs) and his team reached out to him about making the fight with Crawford (36-0, 27 KOs).

With everything that’s happened recently with the pandemic, Arum hasn’t been able to pursue the big fights for Crawford against Pacquiao as well as IBF/WBC welterweight champion Errol Spence Jr. (26-0, 21 KOs). If not for the pandemic, Crawford and Spence would be fighting later this year.

Instead, that fight will need to wait until 2021, at the very least. Boxing needs to restart before Arum can start planning to put Crawford in with Spence and Pacquiao.
Manny is coming off of what some fans view as a career-best win over WBA welterweight champion Keith ‘One Time’ Thurman last July. If Crawford could face Pacquiao next, he would be catching him at an ideal time.

“If we hadn’t had this [global pandemic] situation and if we’d continued doing fights in March and to this day, we’d be talking about a Crawford-Spence fight towards the end of the year,” said Arum to Top Rank Boxing. “So I’m optimistic that it’ll happen next year once this situation clears itself up and once we’re operating as usual again.
“Pacquiao and his people have reached out to me on the possibility of a Crawford fight, and we were hoping to schedule that fight outside of the United States. We’ll have to see. But it’s certainly an interesting fight, and once this clears up, I think we have a way where it can happen.

Crawford reminds Arum of Donald Curry
“The fighter he reminds me the most of is Donald Curry,” said Arum when asked who Crawford reminds him of. “Crawford was such a great welterweight, a good puncher with a lot of skills. A lot of people thought that Curry during his heyday was going to eclipse the great Sugar Ray Leonard. Whenever I see Crawford fight, I always think back to Donald Curry.

“It’s very hard to compare the welterweight fighters from today [from the ones in the past] because the one’s today have the benefit of better nutrition, better training, more advanced training than the welterweights than Ray and Curry’s era,” said Arum.

(Boxing News)