It wasn’t just that the fight was terrific, or that the hometown crowd was turned all the way up to 11 (RIP, Rob Reiner). It was the entire experience: coaxing answers out of Crawford, at that stage of his career painfully bad at media interviews; smiling weakly at incredibly off-color jokes from Omaha’s previous notable boxer, Ron Stander, as we left the arena; Crawford’s family and friends, and in particular his high-energy, high-volume mother Debra, who crossed the street from the arena each evening during fight week and descended on the hotel bar en masse in anticipation and celebration of their boy Bud’s big day; and the sense that maybe, just maybe, we were witnessing the start of something.
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