Two worlds will collide when Jeff Horn and Terence Crawford meet in Las Vegas
JUST after fighting school teacher Jeff Horn took his first nervous steps as an amateur boxer at a small fight club in Brisbane’s south, his rival Terence Crawford was fighting for his life in hospital after being shot in the head.
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JUST after Jeff Horn took his first nervous steps as an amateur boxer at a small fight club at Acacia Ridge in 2008, his great rival Terence Crawford was fighting for his life in a Nebraska hospital after being shot in the head.
Crawford has a long history of violence and a close association with guns.
Brisbane’s “Fighting Schoolteacher’’ comes from a vastly different world to the “Pride of Omaha”, but in one of Australia’s biggest sporting moments of 2018 those worlds will collide tomorrow week at the MGM Grand Casino, a great gaudy, green temple to greed that dominates the Las Vegas strip.
Horn is receiving $2.5 million to defend his world welterweight title against a slick and crafty speedster who has already won two world championships and sees Horn as easy money as he chases the hat-trick.
Horn, 30, was born into a loving family and grew up on acreage in Pallara in Brisbane’s leafy southwest. He has a bachelor’s degree in education from Griffith University.
Terence Crawford, also 30, was born and raised in a tough northern suburb of Omaha, Nebraska, a few kilometres across town from the home of Warren Buffett, the world’s richest man, but a million light years away in circumstance. He comes from a fighting family as his father, grandfather, uncles and cousins were all boxers.
Even now Horn is not a big boxing fan. He famously only took up the sport at 20 to protect himself from bullies and only stayed in it because he was so naturally talented that it gave him the chance to make himself rich beyond his wildest dreams as a part-time schoolteacher just four years ago. Crawford began boxing at 7. After missing out on a place at the 2008 Olympics, he turned professional.
In the decade since, he has become one of the most celebrated fighters in the world, winning championships in the lightweight (61kg) and junior-welterweight (63.5kg) divisions, before turning his attention to Horn’s 66.6kg welterweight crown. He is undefeated in 32 fights with 23 wins by knockout. Six of his last seven wins have come inside the distance, including a devastating knockout of Olympic gold medallist Felix Diaz.
Floyd Mayweather, the greatest boxer of recent times, says Crawford reminds him of himself when he was younger. Plenty agree, adding that Crawford’s attack is even better than Mayweather’s.
Bob Arum, the most powerful man in world boxing for the past 50 years, fully expects Crawford to win next week and wants him to, since he has Crawford signed to a long-term contract.
Not long before Horn’s monumental victory over Manny Pacquiao at Suncorp Stadium last year, I had dinner with Arum, Horn, and Horn’s promoter Dean Lonergan at a Chinese restaurant. Arum was born into a strict Jewish family in New York 86 years ago and while the ageing Harvard-trained lawyer says he once went on a two-day orgy with Muhammad Ali in 1975, he does not waiver in his faith when it comes to banned food.
While Horn carefully explained the subtle differences in taste between Diet Coke and Coke Zero to the dinner guests, Arum insisted that in keeping with the teachings of the Torah, he could not eat anything containing pork or shellfish.
Not everything about the meal was kosher though. While the dinner was convivial enough and Arum regaled us with tales of his time promoting the likes of Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran, Horn knows that Arum was carefully plotting the best way to exploit Horn’s talent.
Arum made Horn jump through hoops to secure the fight with his boxer Manny Pacquiao. To be given a title shot against the 11-time world champ in Brisbane, Horn had to sign options allowing Arum to promote his first two title defences if he won. The first defence was against Englishman Gary Corcoran in December. The second and last comes against Crawford.
Arum wants to keep the title under his control, which means a Crawford victory. And Crawford is the most dangerous opponent Horn has faced. A decade younger than Pacquiao but every bit as fast and awkward, he alternates between left and right-handed stances and is a master of timing and distance.
He’s tough, too. So tough it defies logic. His potty-mouthed, pot-bellied coach Brian “Bomac” McIntyre is a former heavyweight fighter who specialises in intimidating Crawford’s rivals.
In an exclusive interview with Insight McIntyre said: “Terence will f--- up Jeff Horn and then I’ll knock out that coach of his for talking s---. Jeff Horn has no skills and he won’t last seven rounds with Terence. Horn is gonna get a real ass whippin’.
No professional boxer has ever beaten Crawford. Nor has anyone with a gun. On a September night in 2008 in Omaha, Crawford was shot in the back of the head while making the almost fatal mistake of counting his winnings after an illegal dice game under a street-light in his tough part of town.
Crawford had just won his fourth fight as a professional boxer a month earlier at the Johnson County Fairgrounds in Iowa City and was about to fight for the first time on the ESPN network, which will telecast next week’s fight throughout America.
Crawford took his money, and was sitting in the driver’s seat of his 1986 Pontiac Cutlass Supreme when a bullet from a local gangster’s 9mm handgun blew apart the back window and exploded into the right side of Crawford’s head, just below his ear and above his neck. “I got hit,” Crawford told worldboxingnews.net, “and so did one other guy. His arm was shattered.”
The bullet exited through Crawford’s neck but he slumped over the car’s steering wheel, his blood staining the upholstery. Had the bullet not changed course after hitting the back window, Crawford would almost certainly have died. Instead, what did not destroy him only made him stronger.
Holding one hand against his gaping head wound, Crawford somehow came to his senses, turned on the ignition and drove himself to the nearest hospital, using his mobile phone to call his mother, Deborah, and Brian McIntyre along the way.
Crawford remembered sitting in the hospital emergency ward.
“One woman was just out, unconscious; a guy came in with his face bashed in from a baseball bat, and I’m sitting there all bloody and they are telling me they will get to me as soon as they can but that I was in no danger and the others were,” Crawford says.
He had the wound stitched and drove home with his mother and McIntyre.
Two months later he won his fifth pro fight. By knockout. He found out later that the man who had shot him was himself killed by a gunshot wound to the head.
In 2016, while already a two-division world champ, Crawford was sentenced to 90 days in jail along with two years on probation after being found guilty of disorderly conduct and damage to property for his actions at a panel beaters where his 1984 Chevrolet Monte Carlo was being repaired.
Crawford was led away in handcuffs after the hearing. He had told the panel beater he was unhappy with the paint job on his classic car and violently took it back without paying the bill.
Two months later, he reportedly pulled out a gun to break up a brawl between two female acquaintances, prompting the Omaha police to detain him for questioning. He was released, the gun was returned and no criminal charges were filed after Crawford produced a concealed-carry permit.
While boxing has made Crawford a rich man, he has never left the gritty environment in which he grew up. And yet he fights to be a better man.
He has made two humanitarian trips to Rwanda to help the poor and says he is planning a third after the fight with Horn. He has five children with longtime partner Esha Person, including Terence III, and is said to dote on them just like Horn and wife Jo dote on their five-month-old daughter Isabelle.
Jo’s parents have a room adjoining Horn’s suite at the MGM Grand to help look after Isabelle if her crying during the night wakes her world champion father.
But Horn takes her for regular strolls in Vegas and guests at the massive hotel/casino complex were yesterday treated to the sight of one of the world’s toughest boxers helping his wife to carry a pram down a few steps outside their accommodation, and then hugging Isabelle to his chest.
Horn is training at a dilapidated gym just off Dean Martin Drive. In a city that is so associated with other great entertainers such as Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, he wants to be the biggest hit in Vegas next week.
There has been much controversy over the choice of gloves for the fight, with Horn preparing to match fire with fire and fight in the archaic-style horsehair gloves that allow boxers to manipulate the padding so there is very little protection over the knuckles, dramatically increasing the punching power.
Jo has never really liked her husband fighting. He was a shy, bookish school nerd when they met in Year 8 and she is still amazed at the bizarre world her schoolteacher husband now inhabits with multimillion-dollar fights and gun-toting KO artists ready to take his head off.
“I really stress out over his boxing these days because with Jeffrey getting so much better, the opponents are so much better and tougher,” she says. “And they’re more dangerous.”
grantlee.kieza@news.com.au
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