Rough start made Crawford stronger
HE ENDURED recurring nightmares as a child after his uncle was stabbed to death.
And Terence Crawford then bore the brunt of his mother’s drunken fury, being beaten with extension cords and sticks.
“My childhood and upbringing was rough, and I believe that’s what has made me the person I am right now,” Crawford said.
The whipping of the cord against his skin toughened a boy who has grown to become one of the finest boxers on the planet.
At 30, the undefeated Crawford is already being hailed a pugilistic genius, capable of fighting equally well from orthodox and southpaw stance, regularly switching feet during bouts to bamboozle opponents.
But while his backstory has a similarly tragic tone to so many boxing champions, his rural family life now also makes him a real oddity in this sport.
Out of the gymnasium and away from the bright lights, Crawford will be found fishing, riding dirt bikes, hunting deer and running around with his five children in his native Nebraska.
He’ll collect $ 2 million from his fight against Australian WBO welterweight champion Jeff Horn in Las Vegas tomorrow ( 12.30pm AEST).
He’s earned more than $ 6 million in his previous four fights. He’ll make many, many millions more if, as expected, he defeats Horn to claim a world title in a third weight division. It could have been so different. Only four fights into his pro career, Crawford was shot in the head.
It was 2008, and earlier in the day he’d been involved in a scuffle that resulted in a police officer spraying mace in his eyes.
Having washed out the irritant, Crawford went to play a game of street dice in the dicey section of Omaha where the Bloods and Crips gangs were warring.
While sitting in his car counting his winnings around 1.30am, a gunman shot at him through the window. The bullet entered his skull but travelled around his brain rather than through it, a freakish trajectory that saved the life of a man who would go on to make boxing history.
Crawford drove himself to the hospital that night, got stitched up, and vowed to kill his shooter.
He discovered the man’s identity through the grapevine – the shooter had been locked up for another offence.
In an interview with EPSN last week, he revealed how at age 12, after years of taking beatings from his alcoholic mother, he grabbed the belt and told her, ‘ You ain’t hitting me no more’.”
Crawford and his mother have reconciled – his father was barely in the picture – but he still carries the demons from his childhood that in- cluded watching family members battle and succumb to drug addiction.
“Adversity,” Crawford says. “You’ve got the drugs, the crime rate, so many things that’s trying to draw you into all the negativity.
“And you’re trying to do something positive with your life so you’re having like a tug of war with your inner self.”