Teofimo Lopez apparently isn’t backing down from his call out of Terence ‘Bud’ Crawford.
In an interview on Punsh Drunk Boxing, the former unified lightweight champion and current 140-pound titlist ramped up his goading of Crawford for a fight down the line. Crawford fully unified the welterweight division last year with a career-best win over Errol Spence Jr, prompting many fans and observers to anoint the Omaha, Nebraska, native as the best fighter in the sport. (Crawford was subsequently stripped of one of his 147-pound titles by the IBF because of his inability to comply with a mandatory defense).
Lopez and Crawford have been at each other’s throats in the past few weeks, and their animus only increased in the wake of Lopez’s unanimous—but unrelentingly boring—points win over Jamaine Ortiz in a widely lampooned 12-round snoozer. After the fight, Crawford suggested Lopez to “go back to the drawing board, chump.”
A fight with Crawford would arguably be the toughest fight of the 26-year-old native of Brooklyn, New York, but Lopez is not treating it as such.
“Crawford is a human, just like me,” said Lopez, who is promoted by Top Rank. “We bleed the same. He’s just uglier. That motherf— is ugly. Ugly, f— ugly. I don’t know how this man gets…he’s ugly. Sh!t. He even fights ugly. I’ll be real with y’all.
Lopez also brushed off comments from lightweight titlist Shakur Stevenson and rising prospect Keyshawn Davis, both of whom are close friends with Crawford and promotional stablemates of Lopez.
“It’s clout, it’s clout, it’s clout, clout, clout,” Lopez said of Stevenson and Davis. “They don’t want me to fight their big boy. They don’t want me to fight their Mack Daddy, which is Terence Bud Crawford. He’s the Mack Daddy of all those guys.”
In the post-fight interview, Lopez called out Crawford but only on the condition of a catchweight. Crawford responded on social media, saying that stipulation was an automatic nonstarter. Crawford has hinted at moving up to the 154-pound division, and possibly higher. Lopez clarified that he meant that he would fight Crawford anywhere between 147 and 154 pounds.
“When I said I would fight him at a catchweight, he knows what I meant by that because I’ve been saying that to everybody prior,” Lopez said. “I’ll fight you between 147 and 154, I’ll fight you. But then he said go back to the drawing board. That man don’t want no part of me, man. I’m telling you he don’t want no part of me because he knows he’s gon’ have to fight me.
“Crawford is the only reason why I came back (from retirement), anyways, to get that triple crown (third title in a third division),” Lopez added.
It is not clear whom Crawford will fight next. He is contractually obligated to face Spence in a rematch but Crawford himself seemed to pour water over that recently.
Sean Nam is the author of Murder on Federal Street: Tyrone Everett, the Black Mafia, and the Last Golden Age of Philadelphia Boxing.