In light of the latest drama surrounding the WBC stripping Terence Crawford due to him opting not to pay his sanctioning fees, Matchroom promoter Eddie Hearn tries to give his impartial take on what’s transpired from an insider’s perspective. Hearn says that while he doesn’t always agree with how much sanction fees are, he feels that Crawford was a bit out of order to just skip out on paying the WBC altogether after taking the opportunity to go undisputed against Canelo.
“What [Crawford] did is a little bit like going out to a restaurant, having all the best caviar and lobsters, and the bill comes and you go ‘I ain’t paying that’ and then you just walk out,” Hearn said. “Now, you sat down at the table, you wanted to eat all the good stuff, now you got to pay your dues and pay your bill. Now what he will say in answer to that is ‘yeah, but the bill was too much!’ It’s like, no, their rules are their rules.
“You wanted the opportunity to call yourself an undisputed champion, that was important to you. And the only reason you can do that, the way you can do it is to fight for the WBC world title. So if belts ‘don’t matter’ then surely undisputed ‘doesn’t matter’ to you. But of course it does because when you saw him a few hours before displaying his belts, you heard him, ‘I’m undisputed, I’m undisputed, I’m undisputed.’ And the reason why that fight was so historic was he was going for his third undisputed championship — which by the way is incredible.
“I don’t want to have a pop at Terence but I’m just telling you both sides of the argument. For me, if you want to fight for the undisputed championship, you have to abide by the rules of that belt. Now, there’s always going to be negotiation, you can let your point blow, but you can’t leave without paying…You’ve paraded around the ring with that belt. If you look at his cabinet, it’s all the WBC belts — belts matter.
“But this is also the era of — the new wave of boxing coming in are going to try to f-ck all the belts and they are going to kill the WBC, the WBO, the IBF and the WBA and say they’re worthless. And I am doubling down — they are absolutely not worthless. They are the absolute essence of legacy and achievement within the sport. Now do I think the sanction fees are too high sometimes? Of course. We’re always going to think that, aren’t we?
“No one ever really wants to pay the bill, do they? But what you can’t do is chase the legacy, chase the undisputed tag, and then say ‘actually, I didn’t want that.’ No, you fought for it already. You can’t now say ‘I’m not paying.’”
