Freshly crowned junior middleweight titleholder Terence Crawford has made a bold stroke in moving to become the first undisputed three-division champion in the four-belt era by invoking his right to meet new two-belt 154-pound titleholder Sebastian Fundora.
The World Boxing Organization on Wednesday ordered World Boxing Association belt holder Crawford (41-0, 31 KOs) to meet Fundora (21-1-1, 13 KOs), declaring that the sides have 30 days to strike an agreement or the bout will be sent to purse bid.
Crawford stands as the WBO’s interim 154-pound titleholder, and WBO in-house attorney Gustavo Olivieri said the organization is “enforcing its mandatory [bout], accordingly, to have only one champion per division.”
Should both sides agree to fight, the bout, Olivieri said, should occur by year’s end.
Crawford, a four-division champion who turns 37 on Sept. 28, has previously sought to parlay his Aug. 3 unanimous decision victory over former WBA titlist Israil Madrimov into a shot at unified super middleweight champion Saul "Canelo"; Alvarez.
Crawford, of Omaha, Nebraska, reportedly went as far as telling Saudi Arabia’s Turki Alalshikh that he was taking a Canelo-or-bust attitude after Alalshikh said he floated the idea of Crawford meeting unbeaten WBC interim junior middleweight belt holder Vergil Ortiz Jr. next.
Yet the prospect of meeting Fundora, 26, also proves tantalizing because the Coachella, California, product wears the WBC and WBO straps by virtue of his bloody March 30 split decision upset triumph over former WBO titleholder Tim Tszyu of Australia.
Tszyu is moving toward fighting for the remaining IBF 154-pound belt against Russia’s champion Bakhram Murtazaliev on Oct. 19 in Florida, and Tszyu has repeatedly maintained he is willing to fight anyone in the division.
Should Crawford become an undisputed three-division champion, he would join the great Henry Armstrong, who accomplished the feat in the 1930s.
After beating Tszyu by a narrow margin on the scorecards, Fundora was met in the ring that night by former three-belt welterweight champion Errol Spence Jr., who said he wanted Fundora next and was moving up to 154 pounds after his July 2023 destructive loss to Crawford.
While that fight is perceived as the easier one to make because of Fundora and Spence’s promotion by Al Haymon’s Premier Boxing Champions, Fundora promoter Sampson Lewkowicz has told BoxingScene that Fundora wants to maintain his two belts and believes he can defeat the aging Crawford, who didn’t possess the typical knockout power he had displayed in the lighter weight classes when moving up in weight Aug. 3.
The WBO considers Crawford a “super” champion and has previously declared that if Fundora rejects fighting Crawford upon the “super” champion’s request, the WBO will strip Fundora of his belt.
If a Crawford-Fundora agreement can be struck, an interesting wrinkle will be where the fight takes place, because Lewkowicz said Fundora wants to fight in the U.S.
Crawford is strongly backed by Alalshikh, who has an awaiting date in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Dec. 21, a card headlined by unified heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk’s rematch against former WBC titleholder Tyson Fury.
Yet PBC is holding dates in Las Vegas in November, and on Dec. 14 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.
Lance Pugmire is BoxingScene’s senior U.S. writer and an assistant producer for ProBox TV. Pugmire has covered boxing since the early 2000s, first at the Los Angeles Times and then at The Athletic and USA Today. He won the Boxing Writers’ Association of America’s Nat Fleischer Award in 2022 for career excellence.