As far as endings go, Terence Crawford would struggle to pick a greater time to get out of boxing, having only months ago triumphed in front of 60,000 fans inside a Las Vegas stadium before receiving a hero’s welcome in his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska.
“Every fighter knows this moment will come,” Crawford said Tuesday on his YouTube channel, announcing his surprise retirement from the sport. “We just never know when.”
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The American fighter, a five-weight world champion, scored two of the most meaningful victories of the millennium when he thrashed Errol Spence Jr. in an all-time great welterweight beatdown in 2023, and then jumped up three divisions to take on Saul «Canelo» Alvarez at super middleweight and defeated him, too, this past September.
Speculation swirled afterward that Crawford could rematch «Canelo» in 2026, fight a middleweight like Janibek Alimkhanuly to attempt six-weight championship status, or even engage Jake Paul or UFC champ Ilia Topuria in a crossover event. After years of being underpaid and under-leveraged, Crawford had finally arrived at boxing’s most lucrative intersection, where platform, perception and power aligned. One fight a year, Netflix headliners, generational money by age 40. He deserved to cash-in.
But then he walked away at 38 instead.
“I’m stepping away from competition not because I’m done fighting but because I’ve won a different kind of battle,” he said. “The one where you walk away on your own terms.”
By boxing’s own standards, Crawford did everything right.
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He exits with his faculties intact, when his net worth has never been higher, and having topped Uncrowned’s pound-for-pound list as the No. 1 fighter in all of boxing.
Few fighters ever get the chance to truly complete the sport like that, yet it’s what every boxer strives to do. Crawford, after all, retired from boxing like a Floyd Mayweather, rather than the sport retiring him like it did to Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson or Roy Jones Jr., among many, many, others.
By that metric, Crawford is aspirational to younger fighters coming up, as opposed to becoming the sport’s latest cautionary tale.
For years, though, «Bud» was underappreciated, and avoided.
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He became undisputed at 140 pounds when few were watching, moved to a welterweight division that was politically sealed, and stayed so private that fans long felt like they never knew him.
His elite techniques arrived long before global recognition did.
And so, despite accolades at lightweight and above, it was only until he annihilated Spence — in his 40th pro fight — that «Bud» finally received his flowers. Even that could have been a fitting end point for Crawford. But two years later he embodied the pound-for-pound mentality by bamboozling «Canelo» in the Mexican’s own division.
Boxing, its media and its fans, had only just caught up to his greatness before he announced his retirement Tuesday. And that’s what makes this curtain-call so disorienting, as it is both the best possible moment to leave and the one that feels most unfinished.
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It can be true that Crawford leaves like Mayweather, and also that he leaves untold wealth on the table, having arrived at boxing’s richest moment only to walk away from it.
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His absence also hurts American boxing at a critical time.
Crawford was never meant to be the future. He was the present-day bridge, and the proof of American excellence, while the next wave — David Benavidez, Jesse Rodriguez, Devin Haney and Shakur Stevenson — assembled behind him.
But now that bridge is gone.
It leaves Japan’s Naoya Inoue and Ukraine’s Oleksandr Usyk as the sport’s faces, with perhaps only Jake Paul as the loudest American challenger.
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The way in which Crawford led his career may not have been conventional, but neither was his retirement. Quiet, with no farewell tour or compromise, and, as he pointed out himself, “on his terms.”
Crawford has long been likened to the Michael Jordan of boxing because of his ruthless competitive clarity. And like Jordan, he didn’t leave because the game pushed him out.
He simply left because he was done with it.
This jars because boxing just happened to not yet be done with him.
There was no fan fare, no indulgence, and no give and take with the sport. Just a quiet exit on his own terms, at the precise moment boxing had finally arranged itself around him.
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Crawford retires unbeaten, unbroken and fully in control, leaving behind something rare in this era: A standard.
For now, there is no obvious heir to meet it.
