It’s been about a week removed from Terence Crawford’s domination of Errol Spence Jr. to become the new undisputed welterweight world champion and the boxing world is still in awe of his absolutely brilliant performance. I know I am.
From it, boxing critics and fans alike learned — if they didn’t know before — that:
- Terence Crawford is the pound-for-pound best boxer and that’s non-negotiable at this point in time.
- If the money and stakes are right, two boxers and their promoters — regardless of the promotional banners they fight under — can make a bout happen.
To take that a step further, I propose that we as boxing journalists, critics and fans alike, should hereby stop using the phrase "wrong side of the street/other side of the street", altogether. Let’s eliminate it from our vocabulary permanently.
For those who aren't aware, "wrong side of the street" refers to the notion that a potential opponent for any given fighter is too out of reach for the contest to actually get made, no matter how many fans would love to see it. Two fighters being on "opposite sides of the street" is most commonly caused by them being under contract to rival promoters, causing a political hurdle very difficult to overcome for the sake of the audience.
Fight negotiations often range from contentious to painstaking anyway, but the “other side of the street” or "wrong side of the street" phrase is often deployed as a detrimental smoke screen to delay bouts from happening.
Wiping it — or at least, the acceptance of it being a legitimate excuse — from our working vocabularies would make it that much harder from opposing promotional outfits, and their boxers within it, from using it because we wouldn’t feed into it at all.
Just think about how many times the phrase was used to excuse any delays to “Bud” vs. “The Truth” being made. Instead, and to Spence’s credit, he trudged through fellow-PBC fighters — whichever the promotion put in front of him.
He did so methodically to the point where people really wondered if Crawford had faced enough steep challenges to be ready to defeat a Spence as many let the obvious eye test of the Omaha, Nebraska native’s otherworldly boxing skills fall by the wayside.
And we all know how that turned out: three pulverizing knockdowns en route to a jaw-dropping ninth-round TKO, which crowned Crawford an undisputed world champion in two different divisions, joining Claressa Shields as the only boxers to accomplish that feat.
This fight, as well as Gervonta Davis vs. Ryan Garcia, Naoya Inoue vs. Stephen Fulton and even the Tyson Fury-Deontay Wilder trilogy before them, are all proof that the proverbial "wrong side of the street" pothole has been cemented and paved to the point that it doesn’t exist.
There are big fights that involve boxers from two different promotions: Shakur Stevenson vs. Gervonta Davis comes to mind as does “Tank” vs. Devin Haney and Haney vs. Stevenson. Let’s not forget Deontay Wilder vs. Anthony Joshua. And that’s only naming a few.
As those fights — and more like them — hopefully come to fruition, may that pesky five-word phrase never rear its ugly head again.