Terence Crawford accuses WBC of punishing Shakur Stevenson over their own feud: 'It wasn't right at all'

Over the past year, the WBC controversially stripped both Terence Crawford and Shakur Stevenson of their titles following their respective career-defining victories over Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Teofimo Lopez, sparking backlash throughout the boxing world.

Crawford was stripped almost three months after defeating Alvarez because he allegedly did not pay the WBC sanctioning fee for either of his previous two fights — against Alvarez and Israil Madrimov. Stevenson, on the other hand, was relinquished of his WBC crown just three business days after becoming a four-division champion when the prestigious sanctioning body claimed he did not pay a fee for his fight with Lopez.

The part that boxing fans cannot understand? The WBC title was not even on the line for Stevenson vs. Lopez in January, yet the WBC still asked for a $100,000 sanctioning fee.

Crawford told Uncrowned’s “The Ariel Helwani Show” on Wednesday that he believes the WBC’s hasty decision to strip his close friend, Stevenson, was a direct result of his own feud with the sanctioning body.

“I definitely agree with [Stevenson that the WBC targeted him because of my issue with them],” Crawford said. “And that wasn’t right at all, for them to put my name in the conversation that I didn’t have nothing to do with anything that Shakur had going on. So you blame me and try to punish him? It wasn’t right at all.”

Crawford claimed that WBC president Mauricio Sulaimán has since apologized to him in person over their public dispute last year, however the sanctioning body has not attempted to rectify how it handled the situation.

“Nothing [has happened to make peace with the WBC since I was stripped],” Crawford said. “I saw Mauricio … not too long ago. He came up to me and he apologized to me, and he told me that he shouldn’t have said the things that he said. But I kind of felt some type of way, because in my mind, we’re face-to-face and you’re apologizing to me, but you talk negative to me in the public, online and in interviews.

“You should’ve done a public apology to me — that’s how I feel. But I’m not here to keep going back and forth with somebody, so cool, I accept your apology. He said he wanted to sit down with me and talk as men. I’m cool with that because we always had respect for each other face-to-face.

“Now when I’m not around, then it’s different, and I just didn’t like that,” Crawford continued. “I didn’t like the fact that instead of them coming back and [saying], ‘Hey, let’s talk about this, let’s renegotiate,’ they were just basically like, ‘No, we’re the WBC, we ain’t taking that. We’re not like all the other organizations. No, you’ve got to pay us this.’ I was just like, ‘Oh, really? Y’all ain’t getting nothing now because I didn’t agree to nothing.’ I didn’t agree to nothing, so I was just doing that off the strength that I was looking out for all the organizations because that’s what I was going to do.”

The WBC asked Crawford for a $300,000 sanctioning fee for his fight with Alvarez, which was .6% of his reported $50 million purse. Crawford responded at the time with an expletive-laden nine-minute rant, saying he’d reached agreements with boxing’s other three major sanctioning bodies — the WBA, WBO and the IBF — over a fee for the “Canelo” fight and that the WBC should’ve accepted what he was willing to pay them rather than demanding more.

Crawford explained to Uncrowned on Wednesday that he isn’t a fan of the overall manner in which boxing’s sanctioning bodies currently operate. The former pound-for-pound king believes boxers should have more input into how sanctioning fees are spent and that fighters should be financially rewarded for becoming world champions instead of being hit with more expensive bills just days after the belts are wrapped around their waists.

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“I think some of [the sanctioning bodies] are getting too much money, and we don’t have no say-so on where the money is going and what they’re doing with the money and things like that,” he said.

“I do feel some type of way about that because we put our life on the line and do everything that we have to do. We turn around and make it to be a world champion, and we have to pay to be a world champion — not only the time we become world champion, but every single time that we step in the ring. The more money we make, the more money we have to pay to these sanctioning bodies. I think that’s not right.

“I think you should get a prize for winning [a world title]. I think it should be a bonus when you win a championship. And then when you become unified, I think it should be another bonus. And then when you become undisputed, it should be another bonus. I don’t think they should be constantly taking from the fighters that work they’re butt off to get to where they are right now. And knowing that most fighters come from nothing, it’s tough.”