Terence Crawford, Amir Khan will announce April fight
Welterweight world titlist and pound-for-pound star Terence Crawford and former unified junior welterweight titleholder Amir Khan are scheduled to appear at a news conference on Tuesday at a London hotel to announce they will meet this spring.
Top Rank, Crawford’s promoter, sent out a media advisory on Friday afternoon saying that “WBO welterweight world champion Terence ‘Bud’ Crawford and Amir ‘King’ Khan will make a long-awaited announcement” at noon ET. Along with both fighters, Top Rank chairman Bob Arum and Frank Smith, the CEO of Matchroom Boxing, which has Khan’s promotional rights in the United Kingdom but will work with Top Rank on the fight, are scheduled to be in attendance.
Arum told ESPN on Tuesday that “everything looks good” for the fight and that “hopefully we’ll be able to make an announcement next week.”
Top Rank did not announce the date or location of the fight, but Arum said on Tuesday that it would take place on April 20 and headline the first pay-per-view card of the seven-year Top Rank/ESPN partnership. He said the location of the fight is not set yet but that it would take place in Las Vegas or at Madison Square Garden in New York. The site is not expected to be solidified by the time of the news conference.
On Thursday, there will be another media gathering in New York, according to a source with knowledge of the schedule of the fight rollout.
Crawford (34-0, 25 KOs), 31, a three-division world champion from Omaha, Nebraska, moved up to welterweight and knocked out Jeff Horn in the ninth round of a one-sided fight to win a title in on June 9. He made his first defense by one-sided 12th-round knockout of Jose Benavidez on Oct. 13.
Khan, however, is a much bigger name than those two fighters and will be the biggest name Crawford has faced so far in his career. Khan (33-4, 20 KOs), 32, of England, has won two welterweight fights in a row since he was brutally knocked out when he moved up in weight to challenge Canelo Alvarez for the middleweight title in 2016 and then took off 23 months.
Khan opted to fight Crawford rather than finalize a deal for a long-awaited fight with British rival and former welterweight titlist Kell Brook that would have paid him more than the at least $5 million he will make to face Crawford.