The next fight of Jaron ‘Boots’ Ennis 31-0 (28) will be for the IBF welterweight championship of the world after Terence ‘Bud’ Crawford 40-0 (31) was stripped of the New Jersey sanctioning body’s belt.
Former undisputed 147-pound champion Crawford was stuck between a rock and a hard place after Errol ‘The Truth’ Spence Jr 28-1 (22) enacted the immediate rematch clause in his contract with the 35-year-old switch-hitter from Omaha, Nebraska.
Crawford delivered a one-sided nine-round beating to souhtpaw Spence, 33, at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada on July 29, dropping him three times and losing just one round to add the Texan’s IBF strap to his WBC, WBA and WBO baubles.
Maintaining all four belts was always going to be a challenge with competing mandatory commitments. The IBF first to give, stripping Crawford and elevating interim titleholder Ennis to full championship status.
Crawford remains the Ring Magazine’s welterweight world champion.
Ennis’ father Derek ‘Bozy’ Ennis said he wasn’t surprised Crawford got stripped, adding that anyone who wants to challenge his son for the title should hit him up now.
“I already knew about that from the get-go, but I was waiting for them to put it out to know for sure,” he said to YSM Sports Media.
“If they want to fight for the title they got to get in the ring now or they’re going to move up. I don’t know what they’re going to do.
“But if everybody told me they want to fight for a world title. Now is the time. We got the title now. So you got to fight us now. The logical next step is to defend the title.
“So whoever is next in line, and once we do that, we’re going to move on down and try to get the WBC, try to get the WBA and try to move on down and clean the division out.
“It’s great because that’s what we wanted to do, but we wanted to fight for it, though. We didn’t want to have someone give it to us, but we got to take it the way we can get it since nobody wanted to fight us for it, so we had to take it.”
As for any critics who say that Ennis didn’t earn his title in the ring, his father has simple words for them.
“I don’t care about them,” he said.
“If you look at our record and see who we’ve been asking to fight, they shouldn’t have anything to say about it though because we’ve been wanting to fight Spence for the title when Boots was his mandatory and the same with Crawford.
“Like I said [Crawford and Spence] are both great fighters but they’re doing their thing. They can do what they want to do, but now we’ve got the title. We’re going to defend it against whoever is next.”
