Spending so much time together over the past few days has only reinforced what
Terence Crawford already thought about
Canelo Alvarez.
Crawford admires Alvarez, what he has accomplished in boxing and how the four-division champion conducts himself. After they fight Sept. 13 in Las Vegas, Crawford will go right back to being a fan of the Mexican icon.
“He’s a cool dude,” Crawford told
The Ring’s Mike Coppinger. “I ain’t never had no ill will feelings towards him or any negative feelings towards him. We both know it’s just business. After that we can go on being fans of each other.”
This is the biggest business imaginable for
Crawford (41-0, 31 KOs), who will challenge Alvarez (63-2-2, 39 KOs) for his Ring, IBF, WBA, WBC and WBO super middleweight titles at Allegiant Stadium, home of the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders.
Netflix will stream their 12-round, 168-pound championship clash to a subscriber base that exceeds 300 million worldwide.
Their three-city promotional tour continued Sunday at Fanatics Fest 2025 at Javits Center in New York. It’ll conclude Friday in Las Vegas.
Alvarez, 34, and Crawford, 37, have remained respectful toward each other since they agreed to fight. Other than stating the obvious — that both boxers are confident they will win — their comments have been tame, in part because a fight of this magnitude essentially sells itself.
Crawford took a comparable approach to his long-discussed showdown with welterweight rival Errol Spence Jr. in July 2023. The Omaha, Nebraska, native always believed he would defeat Spence convincingly, yet he never allowed the boxing public’s perception of their dynamic affect how he interacted with him.
“I didn’t hate Spence,” Crawford said. “ I let it be known that I was a fan of Spence. I just thought that our people tried to divide each other and to make each other feel like it was like this big hatred thing, when there really wasn’t.”
Crawford dominated Spence, whom he dropped once in the second round and twice in the seventh of a pay-per-view bout that was stopped in the ninth at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. His impressive victory over Spence (28-1, 22 KOs), who has not fought since, crowned Crawford as an undisputed champion in a second division.
Crawford could become a fully unified champ in a third weight class by upsetting Guadalajara’s Alvarez. The former undisputed junior welterweight and welterweight champ is only a slight betting underdog against Alvarez (minus-185/plus-150), even though he has moved up from the junior middleweight limit of 154 pounds to 168 for this legacy-defining opportunity.
Their fight will also match the No. 3 fighter on The Ring’s pound-for-pound list, Crawford, against the eighth-ranked Alvarez.
Keith Idec is a senior writer and columnist for The Ring. He can be reached on X @idecboxing