FIGHTING FOR A PIECE OF THE ACTION
Canadian Crowley learning the ropes
Cody Crowley is the Canadian super-welterweight champion at age 25. He also runs a promotional company and has put Peterborough on the boxing map. Saturday’s card will be his fourth in the town since 2017. Before that, there hadn’t been a boxing event there since 1981. “The fight game is so dirty,” says Crowley, who lives and trains in Las Vegas. “I’m trying to build something that can live on after my boxing career. This is my vehicle to get me to a world title.”
Part of Cody Crowley resents the perceptions.
Like the idea that the 25-yearold Peterborough-area fighter is spoiled because he lives and trains in Las Vegas. He sees himself as a tough kid who fought his way onto the radar of boxing industry titans.
And the notion that he’s an attention-seeking social media star? Crowley points out he’s also a Canadian super-welterweight champ who runs his own promotional company, and logs 40-hour work weeks outside the gym.
But Crowley also knows he benefits from perceptions — specifically the impression that welterweight legend Floyd Mayweather is his close friend and mentor. Mayweather’s name leads news releases, and a 2017 feature on Crowley from CTV’s
W5 described him as “Mayweather’s Canadian secret weapon.” A video of Mayweather endorsing “Canada’s best fighter” also appears on Crowley’s Instagram feed, hinting that the fighter who calls himself “The Best Ever” is also invested in Crowley’s success.
Whatever the real relationship is between them, Crowley has already adopted one important aspect of the Mayweather playbook: running his own promotional company instead of letting promoters control his career.
“The fight game is so dirty. You’re fighting for pennies while these promoters are making hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Crowley, who grew up in Douro, outside of Peterborough. “I’m trying to build some- thing that can live on after my boxing career. This is my vehicle to get me to a world title.”
Saturday’s show will mark the fourth in Peterborough since Crowley started staging events there in May of 2017. That card was the first in Peterborough since 1981, and before that the town hadn’t hosted a boxing event in 50 years.
Turning Peterborough into a boxing market meant tapping into latent interest in the sport, which in turn required a local protagonist behind whom the community could unite. In 2015, more than 170 residents made the hour-long drive to Ajax to watch Crowley compete. The contingent spent $17,000 on tickets, and signalled the fighter could do even bigger numbers fighting closer to his hometown.
“He’s good at promoting himself, and he talks well,” said Tyler Buxton, who promoted that Ajax show. “He knows how to get attention. He’s got that figured out.”
Crowley co-promoted his first two shows with Buxton, but that pair has since split up and the boxer now heads a four-person team that organizes fights in Peterborough. Trainer Ibn Cason and Crowley work from Las Vegas, while Crowley’s parents handle logistics locally. All of it, the fighter says, is a grind that contradicts gossip dismissing him as a trust-fund boxer.
“If we had money we wouldn’t be working eight hours a day from our phones (and) my parents wouldn’t be working 40 hours a week on top of their jobs,” he said. “It looks like we’ve made it, but really all we’re doing is struggling to get there.”
The scale and structure of CCC Promotions differ sharply from Mayweather Promotions, which is run by boxing’s biggest celebrity and does business with Showtime, as well as boxing power broker Al Haymon. And Cason acknowledges casting Mayweather and Crowley as buddies overstates the case. He calls all the men “colleagues,” linked via Las Vegas boxing networks.
Cason says he first connected Crowley and Mayweather in 2015, when a member of Mayweather’s team asked Cason to refer a southpaw sparring partner tough enough to absorb punishment from the champ. Training camp for the Manny Pacquiao fight had just started and several sparring partners had already quit. Cason says he brought Crowley to Mayweather’s gym and the relationship flowered from there.
“When Floyd’s trying to prepare for a fight he doesn’t take any shortcuts, so he only wants the best of the best in there with him,” said Cason, who also manages Crowley. “Once he got a taste of Cody the first time, he wanted him back.”
For his part, Crowley says he showed up at Mayweather’s gym unsolicited after the Pacquiao bout was announced, and hung around for two weeks until the champion called him into the ring to spar.
Either way, Crowley landed on Mayweather’s payroll as a sparring partner before the Pacquaio fight, and returned when Mayweather trained for his drubbing of UFC star Conor McGregor.
Mayweather, who owns a promotional company, never offered Crowley a contract, but time in camp added to Crowley’s in-ring craft and gave him a powerful name to drop.
It all drives opponents like Stuart McLellan nuts.
The 32-year-old from Williams Lake, B.C. points out that Crowley won’t be the only fighter in Saturday’s main event to invest everything in his ring career. Where Crowley moved to Las Vegas to train and turn pro, McLellan worked construction for years before quitting his day job to concentrate on boxing.
But, McLellan says, Crowley receives extra attention from fans and media because he has sparred with Mayweather. The two fighters have traded insults over Instagram, and McLellan says he’ll expose Crowley’s limitations.
“It’s cute that he sparred with Mayweather, but it doesn’t mean (Crowley) is Mayweather, or can do any of the things he does,” McLellan said. “I turned pro on three weeks’ notice and earned everything the hard way. This guy knew all the right people and had money behind him. In my mind, he’s a fraud, and I’m going to prove that February 9.”
Crowley’s camp contends that anything that spurs interest in the fight — from a social media beef to Mayweather’s perceived support — generates ticket sales and helps all fighters involved.
While Crowley hopes to grow his company into a full-service promotional outfit that makes money from TV and digital streaming, right now it depends heavily on traditional income streams such as local sponsorship and gate revenue.
Crowley says previous Peterborough cards have drawn roughly 3,500 ticket-buyers, but within two years he thinks he can fill Scotiabank Arena for a main event against a namebrand 154-pound champion such as Jarrett Hurd or Tony Harrison. “Now when I come back to the big promoters, I’m not coming back as a fighter,” Crowley said. “I’m going to be coming back as a partner and an equal.”