Terence Crawford never felt that he could get a fair shake from Al Haymon, so long as he was on “the wrong side.”

Crawford recently lifted the lid on his side of the negotiations for the scuttled undisputed welterweight bout between him and Errol Spence Jr. During his Instagram Live tell-all, Crawford pointed the finger at Spence’s longtime handler, Premier Boxing Champions’ founder Haymon, for refusing to be “transparent” with him on certain financial issues and for not considering an outside investor’s supposedly guaranteed money as major reasons why a deal could not be made.

Crawford, the WBO beltholder at 147, is now scheduled to face David Avanesyan Dec. 10 in Crawford’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, on BLK Prime, an obscure outfit that is purportedly offering Crawford an extravagant purse.

In his Instagram Live session, Crawford spoke positively about Haymon as a person, but he said he could never ignore the fact that Haymon had Spence's welfare chiefly in mind. Spence has been a Haymon client since the beginning of his professional boxing career. Crawford, on the other hand, is essentially a free agent after he parted ways with longtime promoter Top Rank last year. (Haymon's PBC has substantial content deals with Showtime and Fox, platforms that have large visibility and marketing prowess, and the understanding was that one of those two networks would have delivered the fight via pay-per-view).

“Like I said before, Al Is a cool dude,” Crawford said during a recent interview on The DAZN Boxing Show. “I like talking to him, but at the same time Errol Spence is his guy. That’s who he’s going to go to bat for. When you’re with him, he’s going to go through tooth and nail with you. If you’re not with him, you’re on the wrong side.”

A question was then posed to Crawford as to why he simply could not link up with Haymon and become “one of his guys”, if only on a fight-by-fight basis, in similar fashion to, say, the now-retired multiple-division champion Mikey Garcia.

“What’s stopping you with being one of his guys?” co-host Barak Bess then asked Crawford. “Even if it’s fight-by-fight basis ­­— Mikey Garcia and other guys who did that — what’s stopping you from being that and being treated better and getting guarantees?”

Garcia, a native of Southern California and for a period regarded as one of the top boxers in the sport, was a longtime client of Haymon. Garcia famously had a legal battle with Top Rank and Haymon aided Garcia during that time. Garcia and Top Rank eventually settled, at which point Garcia started to box under the PBC umbrella. Key fights for Garcia include main event tussles with Adrien Broner, Sergey Lipinets, Robert Easter Jr., and, of course, Spence.

But Crawford responded by saying that he feels Garcia was simply used by Haymon as fodder for Spence, and is evidence, to Crawford, that Garcia was not properly looked after. In 2019, Garcia valiantly moved up a few divisions to face Spence in a welterweight match at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, but the intriguing contest was hardly competitive, with Spence out boxing the much smaller Garcia with ease over 12 rounds. That was Garcia’s last fight with PBC. He finished out his career with two fights with a rival outfit, Eddie Hearn's Matchroom, including his last fight, a shocking loss to Sandor Martin in October 2021. 

For Crawford, that is a sign that Haymon did not have Garcia's interests in mind, at least relative to Spence.

“When you look at Mikey Garcia, Mikey Garcia was never his guy,” Crawford explained. “Mikey Garcia was just used to catapult Errol Spence to a different level, by using Mikey Garcia and all his accomplishments to elevate Errol Spence from where he was to now.”

“But you gotta think it was all tailored made for him to build him up, give him a couple fights, and ultimately him and Spence was going to fight,” Crawford said. “Yeah, we’ll throw you a bone here and there just to get you excited, and you know, believing in us, but after the Errol Spence fight where was Mikey Garcia?”

Crawford has been adamant that he is not the party that is responsible for putting the kibosh on what many fans consider to be the most appealing fight that can be made in the sport today.

"It’s obviously not my fault why the fault hasn’t happened," Crawford said.