Gervonta Davis leaned back from the microphone, a slow grin creeping onto his face, brimming with the earned confidence of a man who’s seen this all before.
“You know what I come to do, man,” the World Boxing Association’s lightweight champion said. “You know why I’m here. I don’t want to say too much. [His mother] is over there in the corner. Got to keep it polite, but y’all know: fireworks.”
It was the same styling of laconic menace he’s dispensed at nearly every press conference before his fights, and yet it still sent a quiet ripple through the Barclays Center atrium on Thursday afternoon. Because when Davis says it, history has shown he’s standing on business. Thirty bouts, 30 wins, 28 knockouts. World titles at 130lb, 135lb and 140lb while selling out arenas from coast to coast. There’s a reason why the squat Baltimore southpaw nicknamed Tank has become the face of American boxing and one of its vanishingly few dependable box-office attractions. People don’t just pay to see him win. They tune in to see how he finishes the show.
And once more Davis has promised them something worth watching. On Saturday night in Brooklyn, he will look to add another victim to the list when he defends his lightweight strap against Lamont Roach Jr, a super featherweight belt-holder moving up a division for a shot at a seismic upset. Granted special permission to retain his 130lb title while taking on Davis at 135, Roach has seized on the opportunity to turn the industry on its ear. “I’m here to boogie,” he said Thursday. “I got a big tool bag and I’m coming with everything in it.”
The 29-year-old challenger from Washington DC is a capable operator with above-average hand speed and technical ability borne from a deep amateur background. He’s won six on the trot since his lone professional defeat to Jamel Herring in 2019, including an upset by split decision over Héctor Luis García to become a first-time world champion in 2023. But the steps up in weight and class he’ll make on Saturday have left most onlookers terribly pessimistic about his chances. Not least the oddsmakers, who have priced Davis as a vertiginous 1-20 favorite.
The reality is that for Davis, this fight is just another showcase. Another sellout crowd, another headline event, another lucrative payday on Amazon Prime’s young pay-per-view platform. The $79.95 price tag won’t keep the fans away. Barclays will be packed, buzzing, waiting for the moment Tank finds his shot and shuts off the lights. That’s the expectation. The real question is what comes next.
Even as the cheerier-than-normal Davis engaged in the typical pre-fight back-and-forth on Thursday with Roach, the conversation among boxing’s chattering class remained fixated on when he will finally take on one of the big names at or around the 135lb division, among them Devin Haney, Vasiliy Lomachenko and Shakur Stevenson. That question, or some version of it, has hung over Davis’ career for years with no resolution in sight. When Stevenson called him out directly over the weekend, urging Davis to make “the biggest fight in boxing” after his clear but underwhelming win over Yorkshire electrician Josh Padley in Riyadh, Davis’ response to the three-weight champion was open ridicule.
Still, even Tank’s most hardcore supporters are getting restless, more so as he’s started dropping increasingly frequent hints at retirement. Davis’s résumé is filled with spectacular knockouts, but has he had the defining fight? The one that silences what doubters remain? The one that etches his name among the all-time greats? A high-profile stoppage of a weight-drained Ryan Garcia two years ago was the closest thing to it. But none of Davis’ other 12 opponents in the eight years since he became a world champion have been considered serious threats by the sportsbooks.
This weekend’s fight against Roach is expected to be another showcase. The chances that we’ll learn something about the Marylander that we didn’t already know are minimal. No one will remember Davis for how he handled Roach. They’ll remember him for the fight he hasn’t taken yet.
And that’s what makes Saturday night feel like a stepping stone. A sold-out arena, a four-fight pay-per-view card stacked with title fights – Jose Valenzuela defending his WBA junior welterweight title against Gary Antuanne Russell, Alberto Puello putting his WBC 140lb belt on the line against Sandor Martín – but the whole night, every result, every highlight will just build toward the question Tank can’t escape.
Davis has been here before. This will be his fourth time fighting at Barclays, but the first in nearly three years. The last time, in 2022, he knocked out Rolly Romero in six rounds, breaking the venue’s live gate record before a celebrity-flecked crowd including Madonna at ringside. The first, back in 2017, he won his first world title, stopping Jose Pedraza in seven. It’s a building that’s been good to him – he described it as a “second home” on Thursday – where so much of his professional story has been written.
Now aged 30 and seemingly at the peak of his powers, Davis insists he’s looking to be more active in 2025. He was limited to one fight last year after a delicious unification bout with Lomachenko failed to materialize, but his plan is to fight three times this year – something he hasn’t done since 2019. That would be a welcome shift, but volume won’t replace legacy. If he wants to be remembered as an all-time great, he’ll have to take a fight that means more than just another knockout on his record.
So far Davis’s shimmering brilliance inside the ropes has been enough to relegate a disturbing pattern of allegations and criminal charges – including accusations of domestic violence, multiple assault arrests, a hit-and-run crash in November 2020 that left four people hospitalized including a pregnant woman, and an arrest just days before a major fight for allegedly striking a woman who was heard in a 911 call pleading for her life – to the margins of his narrative. He remains America’s problematic fave: the conservative back-of-the-napkin math suggests he’s amassed more than $65m in career earnings. Crucially, that financial security has made him one of the only A-list boxers in a position to resist the courtship of Turki al-Sheikh, the chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority, whose bottomless coffers have turned Riyadh into the sport’s epicenter in two short years.
Someone asked Roach on Thursday if there was a chance his confidence in springing the upset was misplaced. “What am I supposed to say when they ask me questions?” he said, emotions rising. “What am I supposed to say? Oh, he’s going to [knock me out]? I’m going to say what I got to say. I know what I can do.”
Davis just smiled, before interrupting the sound bite to infantilize his opponent. “You bring your mother,” he said, breaking a derisive grin.
Maybe Roach will prove him wrong. Maybe Saturday night will be tougher than anyone expects and Ms Roach will get the last laugh. But the real fight isn’t this weekend. It’s the one waiting in the distance, whenever Davis decides to take it.
