Spence When?

– I’ll pull hammers from my waist

We can clap at this amateur pace

if that’s whats crackin or we can play this on All-Madden

Can you even fathom not having a fear in the world?

I’m cool in my afterlife if I’m reading these chapters right –

–Jay-Z, People Talk

He walks. For inquiring minds that need to know, you’ll get what you want in a few weeks. The answer to the question that drives you.

The time for unbeaten, tyrannical IBF welterweight champion Errol Spence Jr. (22-0, 19KOs) is right now, 2018, as his campaign for fistic dominance is likely to culminate with great interest in a most compelling face-off with 2017 FOTY and former undisputed super lightweight champion Terence “Bud” Crawford.

It all begins with a January 20 Barclays Center appointment in Brooklyn with veteran Lamont Peterson (35-3-1, 17KOs), who will most likely leave New York diagnosed with head trauma and kidney failure, after being kidnapped in front of a LIVE audience broadcast on Showtime, by the game’s most punishing volume puncher.

In his corner, is 2017 TOTY Derrick James, who decided to bolster the Spence ascension by having his southpaw menace engage WBC super welterweight champion Jermell Charlo, in what James described as sparring better than any fight that took place in 2017. This was prior to his May 2017 annihilation of Kell Brook, a fight yours truly accurately predicted would end via 11th round TKO (see Spence V Brook: Annihilation).

James knew that Spence would need every bit of the intense preparation he endured to vanquish Brook as an enemy soldier in London. Now, having watched Crawford generate accolades on the cusp of invading his space and Vasyl Lomachenko grab pound for pound honors, Spence views Peterson (a renowned Clubber Lang in gym wars with legends like Floyd Mayweather) as the problem he needs to bludgeon his way to a solution: Most feared fighter on the planet.

Ask Keith “One-Time” Thurman. The WBC/WBA welterweight champion appears to know that Spence would most likely cut his ponytail about as easily as the wild barber did Eddie Murphy’s in “Coming To America.”

For Spence, his coming out party to 2018 should look similar in context to the August 2016 contest with Leonard Bundu, where the iron-willed veteran was turned into what could not be confused with a bundle of joy. This will be an old-school fight; an ode to a more rugged era of hip-hop, where things got delivered with more roughness around the edges and subtlety went out of the damn window. In a pitched battle that will feature seismic trench warfare, expect Spence to cajole, confront and ultimately corral a game Peterson before getting him concussed for at least :18 seconds.

The soon to be 28 year-old Texan by way of Long Island, NY isn’t especially brash, but is a defiant legend in the making that knows it. “The Truth” doesn’t set anyone free inside of the squared circle, and will set no bail for Peterson – or anyone else.

His is development unarrested.