by Zachary Easterling
On September 13, 2025, the young Allegiant Stadium, home of the Las Vegas Raiders football team, saw attendance records shattered. That night, Omaha, Nebraska’s Terence “Bud” Crawford became the undisputed super-middleweight champion of the world, improving his unblemished record to 42 wins, by moving up two weight classes to defeat Saul “Canelo” Alvarez via unanimous judges’ decision. This historic victory in the Nevada desert made Crawford a four-division, three-time undisputed champion and confirmed his status as an all-time talent. The dominance of Crawford’s victory has cemented his current standing as the best boxer in the world, pound-for-pound.
On the night of their fateful collision, Terence Crawford made his ringwalk in an outfit inspired by the 1995 action-western film Desperado. In the film, Antonio Banderas stars as El Mariachi, a man out for revenge against a drug lord who killed his lover. Musically accompanied by his childhood friend, Rosendo Robles, and his mariachi band, Crawford adopted this role for his ringwalk. Walking out to “Cancion Del Mariachi,” Crawford proves a point that he emphasized throughout the promotion: that he “had Mexicans on his side too.” Where others sought to sell the fight by fomenting a rivalry between Mexicans/Mexican Americans and African Americans, Crawford took a different tack. Instead of wearing a sombrero and the colors of the Mexican flag like Floyd Mayweather, for example, he chose a presentation that paid homage rather than caricaturizing Mexican culture. Like the character El Mariachi, Crawford carried a black guitar case with him. In the film, El Mariachi carries a plethora of weapons in his case; however, as Crawford would tell boxer turned journalist Andre Ward in an interview, “I was the weapon that night.”
Canelo Alvarez has been the face of boxing for roughly a decade, and came into the fight as the betting favorite for good reason. The 35-year-old Mexican star turned professional at 15 and has amassed a hall-of-fame-worthy body of work. Alvarez was perceived to be nearly unbeatable at super-middleweight after pummeling all the division’s best fighters into unconsciousness or retirement in four back-to-back showings between December 2020 and November 2021. However, going into the Crawford fight, careful observers noticed that the knockouts had dried up since 2021. Even more interesting, the Caleb Plant fight, as well as his fights with Floyd Mayweather, Erislandy Lara, Billy Joe Saunders, Dmitrii Bivol, and even the preceding stinker of a match he won against William Scull, all showed that Canelo could be offensively neutralized by fleet-footed boxers with superior hand speed. As Crawford would tell Andre Ward in an interview following the fight, “the blueprint [to beat Canelo] was already out there.” Because of this, Team Crawford knew that the real challenge would not be figuring out how to beat Alvarez, but rather executing it.
Bud is a natural counter-puncher and the best switch-hitter since Marvelous Marvin Hagler. Able to operate in both left and right-handed stances, he is known to flow from southpaw to orthodox mid-combination to take advantage of his opponent’s miscalculation and defensive lapses. This is the method by which he dismantled and retired Errol Spence Jr. and Shawn Porter. However, against Alvarez, Bud fought almost entirely in the southpaw position, creating an open stance contest with the super-middleweight champ that saw Canelo trying and failing to overcome Crawford’s highly educated lead-right hand. Using faints, probes, and lateral movement, Crawford negated Canelo’s power by taking away his opportunities to punch with his weight behind him. However, Bud came to do more than just cleanly outbox Alvarez, as his fight with Jeff Horn demonstrates; he’s no stranger to the rough stuff. When Canelo was able to close the distance and force Bud to fight rather than box, he found himself manhandled and outwrestled by the smaller man. Losing on the outside and at close range, Canelo became dejected and visibly frustrated by round eleven. Crawford showed himself to be a complete boxer, not at all too small to handle one of the most dominant fighters of recent memory. With distance management, superb countering, and uncanny strength, Crawford executed the blueprint like a master architect and built a performance that earned Alvarez’s respect. He calls Bud the best he has ever faced. With this, the boy from the ghetto of North Omaha proved he was the best in the world.
In response to this triumph, the city of Omaha organizes a parade in his honor. On September 27, 2025, the day before Bud’s 38th birthday, a sunny day, around 70 degrees, the city celebrates its champion. Local news interviews onlookers to ask their feelings, excited, many tell reporters they regard Bud as the “GOAT,” the greatest of all time, as dancers in outfits modeled after Crawford’s fight night appearance make their way down the wide streets of downtown Omaha. A stage is set up in the lushly green Heartland of America park, and speeches are given by local politicians, Ring Magazine CEO Rick Reeno, and Crawford’s protégé, the undefeated three-division world champion Shakur Stevenson. Well wishes are sent via video from a range of celebrities, including Eminem and Shaq, followed by special birthday messages from Crawford’s seven children. The parade goers collectively sing “Happy Birthday” before Bud gives a speech thanking his team and community for their support.
Early the next morning, on September 28th, 1919 (the 106th anniversary of the courthouse lynching of Will Brown) far from Netflix cameras and the lights of the Vegas strip, at around 1:27 am, according to police reports, a car was pulled over, leaving a parade afterparty. The occupants included Terence Crawford, his chief of security, and two others, all African American. The officers report spotting a texting driver in a car accelerating past their cruiser at unsafe speeds. When they pull over the vehicle, after a brief exchange, they report seeing a firearm on the floor. This fact is disputed. What is not disputed is that there were two pistols in the car, which the driver divulges directly to the officer; however, it is important to note that all of the car’s occupants were legally permitted to carry firearms. Upon hearing this, according to police reports, the officer draws his service weapon and orders everyone out of the vehicle, including the man with a street named after him in the same city, Terence Crawford. Qasim Shabazz, Crawford’s chief of security, points out the irony in a September 29th interview, “How [Crawford] could be a man to receive his second key to the city, and have a firearm pulled on him by the Omaha Police Department all in the same day, imagine that.” Though I agree that this juxtaposition in treatment reveals something important about our society, treating it as ironic implies problematic assumptions. Most glaring amongst those is the assumption that anyone should be treated that way.
An internal investigation was ordered the next day by John Ewing, the city’s first-ever African American mayor. Also hailing from “down north,” the local parlance to refer to northern Omaha, Ewing is familiar with his community’s challenges with policing. On October 3rd, Ewing appeared in a press conference alongside Omaha police Chief Todd Schmaderer. There, Schmaderer admits that Black people are more likely to be pulled out of their cars at gunpoint, saying, “Quite frankly, that is generally a true statement. The number of stops are disproportionate. That is nationwide.” State and local leaders see Bud’s treatment as a part of a long-standing tension between the Black community and the Omaha PD. I agree; however, Bud’s being a great boxer presents the chance to see more. On September 13, thanks to the power of streaming, he participated in the most viewed spectacularized representation of what many would consider pure violence: a prizefight. However, even when facing a man known to break bones with a punch in Canelo Alvarez, secured by a shared ruleset, Crawford thrived. By comparison, in the traffic stop, the rules were not only vague but clearly different for the actors, depending on their role and race. This is the difference between Crawford’s conflict with Canelo and the violence of the Omaha PD, and it raises many questions about policing. For example, what is the life-threatening difference between Black gun ownership in law and in practice? More than anything, what happened to Bud should prompt us to think deeply about what it means to be a weapon, its virtues, and its risks.
Crawford is known to have survived a bullet wound to the head and to have been dismissed from the US Olympic team for an out-of-the-ring brawl with a teammate. As he told a group of inmates at the Nebraska Correctional Youth Facility in 2016, he has experienced the repercussions of bad choices. However, now as a mature fighter, he has mastered himself and learned to adapt to his opponents. Three weeks after his encounter with Omaha PD, Bud returns home after a victory celebration tour of Japan and the WBO annual conference in Colombia. Back in Omaha, he declines to comment on the event with Omaha PD and instead turns his productive energies towards the community. On October 22, in a ceremony organized by The Black Brown and Red Coalition, Terence received a high honor from the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska and was given a hand-stitched quilt. As LeVelle Wells of the U’mon ‘hon Nation notes, “He has a lot of love from the Native American Community. Although there [are] not too many natives in the city, but there [are] some on the reservation. Most on the reservation, they love him. They really support him a lot.” When I saw this and recalled the statement of unity Crawford made through his walkout performance, I cried, moved by the realization of what a true world champion is: a weapon of unity. A champion is someone who has mastered not the sport but themselves and wields that mastery as a rallying point for others. Crawford’s support from Black, Latino, and Indigenous Nebraskans exemplifies this. In this way, Omaha PD was correct to recognize a potency in Crawford; though it was not his skin but rather the refinement of his mind and body that had turned him into a weapon.
“I Was The Weapon That Night” was written by Zachary Easterling and powered by the BGX Editorial Circle x SYNTAX
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