“It was quite sad watching Errol Spence in that fight, to be honest with you,” Hearn said to Jai McAllister Boxing. “Having promoted him in his prime in the Kell Brook fight, like how good he was. He was a shell of himself, and I think he has been for years.”
Spence had been putting considerable strain on his body well before his October 2019 car crash. He allowed his weight to climb substantially between fights and acknowledged having to spend portions of training camp taking it back off. After his grueling win over Shawn Porter in September 2019, Spence admitted there was nothing good about gaining more than 25 pounds and then using camp to lose it. The crash came less than two weeks later and kept him out of the ring for more than a year.
Spence returned against Danny Garcia in December 2020 and won comfortably, but the destructive version that finished Brook wasn’t there. Garcia was 32 and already had losses to Porter and Keith Thurman.
The difficulties continued against Yordenis Ugas in 2022. Ugas badly hurt Spence in the sixth round before Spence recovered, took control, and ended the fight in the tenth.
Crawford then produced the most one-sided defeat of Spence’s career in July 2023, dropping him three times before the ninth-round stoppage.
The performance deserves full credit. But it also created the impression that Crawford alone was responsible for making Spence look so ordinary.
Years of difficult weight management, punishing fights, inactivity, and the physical consequences of the car crash had already taken something from Spence before Crawford got him.
Hearn saw Spence near his best against Brook. His belief that Spence had been a shell for years supports what the previous fights were already showing: Crawford didn’t destroy the prime version of Errol Spence.
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