[8] Victory over Maddox, followed by another over Tom Blake a month later,[9] persuaded him to become a professional pugilist, under the supervision of Captain Robert Barclay.

Later, the foremost prizefighting reporter, Pierce Egan, stated that he was aware that some "friends of the CHAMPION" had encouraged the myth that Cribb enjoyed an unbeaten career by "withholding the name of his vanquisher" (Boxiana, vol.

Having beaten Gregson, Belcher and Molineaux, Cribb's reputation was so high that he received no further challenges for a further eleven years, and eventually retired from the ring in 1822.

Dowling (1841) records that 'On 15th May 1822, Cribb publicly resigned the championship on the stage of the Fives Court, on which occasion he was presented with a belt, and was succeeded by Tom Spring'.

Cribb's tomb, in the shape of a lion resting his paw on an urn, still stands in St Mary's Gardens in Woolwich.

Cribb features prominently in George MacDonald Fraser’s novel Black Ajax, a fictionalised account of Tom Molineaux's life.

In Charles Dickens' comic novel Martin Chuzzlewit (ch.9), Cribb is humorously cited as the inventor of a defensive stance used by the boy Bailey, as the landlady Mrs Todgers aims a smack at his head.

Georgette Heyer's 1935 novel, Regency Buck, opens with Cribb's fight with Molineaux at Thistleton Gap in Rutland in 1811.