James Fires Back At Spence's Camp Criticism

Errol Spence called his preparation for the Terence Crawford fight "trash."

Derrick James has a more specific account of what actually went wrong — and a clear sense of who is responsible for the parts that were genuinely problematic. The trainer did not deny that the camp was disrupted. What he disputed was the diagnosis.

"We weren't able to do everything that we normally do to prepare for a fight. I had two other training camps going on at the same time. They never trained at the same time, but they were going on simultaneously. I won't say it was trash, but it's his perception, so nothing I can do about it,” James

The sparring situation, which Spence has pointed to as a central failure of the camp, is where James's account becomes most detailed. He says Spence did spar — two weeks of work with switch-hitters, both capable of fighting left and right-handed to simulate Crawford's style. The problem was what happened during that sparring.

"Supposedly he got injured in the last week of the sparring, so he couldn't spar for the next eight weeks because he had suffered an injury. That's the only thing that was really different — that he didn't have the ability to spar because he was injured,” James

James described the moment he became aware of the injury. Spence did not acknowledge it immediately, and James did not witness the incident that caused it. It was only in the following week, when patterns in training started to shift, that the information surfaced. The decision to shut down sparring entirely came from Spence's father.

"His father said he's not sparring, he's going to save it for the fight. His father is the one that said no sparring,” James

The two have since parted ways and exchanged lawsuits. Spence returns against Tim Tszyu on July 25, now working with Ronnie Shields.