Kathy Duva Speaks Out On…Well, Everything (Part 1)

Published

11 years ago

April 23, 2014

You say this latest “Cold War” pitting Showtime and Golden Boy’s Richard Schaefer against HBO and Top Rank founder Bob Arum is basically a new twist on an old theme? Something with elements of hostility and intrigue that boxing really hasn’t seen before, at least to this degree, and might never see again?

How naïve such an assumption would be. Main Events CEO Kathy Duva might now merely play the role of interested observer, given her lack of direct involvement with either of the warring factions, but she was in the midst of a nearly identical battle, with different principals, 20 or so years ago, and she says that what happened then makes today’s combatants seem as if they are engaging in child’s play. The difference between then and now is the dizzying rise of social media, which takes every squabble, every veiled or direct insult that used to take place behind closed doors or in private conversations, and puts the nastiness out there on Twitter or Instagram for everyone to see.

So Duva, whose company has found a cozy television home on NBC SportsNet, sits back and watches as Showtime’s forces engage in a bitter and expensive war of attrition with its opposite numbers at HBO, the end result of which could be the mutual destruction of each side or, at least, one or the other.

And Duva figures she or some other patient entrepreneur will be sitting there like a spider, waiting to feast on the fleshy remains of the struggle scattered about on the world wide web. Something new – maybe better, maybe not — almost surely must arise in such an eventuality because, well, the fight game isn’t just going to go away because the two biggest current players have bled themselves dry. Somehow, some way, boxing always survives, doesn’t it? Just like the common cockroach survived the Ice Age while mighty dinosaurs didn’t.

“If HBO and Showtime beat each other up enough, and make each other small enough because their executives get tired and say, `We’re not going to bankroll this anymore,’ you’re going to see other networks come back into boxing,” Duva theorized. “We’re already close. ESPN has already bought a heavyweight title fight (in which WBO/WBA/IBF champion Wladimir Klitschko defends against Alex Leapai this Saturday evening in Oberhausen, Germany).

“What’s happened is that HBO’s budget for boxing has shrunk. Showtime’s has grown. But if you look at the money they spend on boxing as opposed to what they spend on one football game, any network that has the will to do it could come into this business and blow them both away on the same day.

“The result of this fight is that they’re going to empower somebody else because that’s how this business works. It’s not like they have only the two premium cable outlets and a finite number of fighters. There’s always going to be somebody else, and that’s the part that the two of them are just not thinking about. It’s the part that will create opportunities for someone like me, so I’m not arguing about it or knocking it.

“ESPN or NBC, or maybe CBS, will say, `Hey, here’s a great big void. Let’s jump in and take it over.’ When you try to eliminate competition, all you do is creating openings for somebody else. Really, I’m kind of happy about it. I’m not going to lie. I got no problem with the `Cold War.’ It was great for Main Events the first time. We put a lot of great fights on HBO during that time. Don King took his fighters elsewhere (to Showtime) and it created dates for us.”

Spanish philosopher/essayist George Santayana once observed that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. In the mid-1990s, HBO and Showtime were tossing similarly poison-tipped darts at one another, albeit with the better-financed, more powerful HBO in an even more obvious position of strength and scrappy Showtime hoping to take its haughty tormentor down a peg or two. And while Duva’s late husband, Dan, held a seat at the head table, he also knew, as his widow does now, that he could become the beneficiary of whatever collateral damage was wrought by the fierce determination of the arch-rivals to inflict as much damage upon the other as was humanly possible.

Playing the role of current HBO Sports president Ken Hershman then was the well-financed Seth Abraham, boxing’s equivalent of New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Current Showtime honcho Stephen Espinoza predecessor was the late Jay Larkin, forever asked to do more with less and doing it with some degree of regularity. Arum was still Arum, then as now a feisty, spit-in-your-eye sort long on vinegar and short on patience. But instead of Schaefer, Arum’s mortal enemy was Don King, publicly harrumphing “Only in America!” while cutting backroom deals that any seedy Washington politician would have been envious of.

And where the pivotal figure in the ring today is Floyd Mayweather Jr., who crossed the street from HBO to Showtime and brought his enormous star power with him, Showtime’s big-ticket attraction was Mike Tyson, who was to do for Larkin what Mayweather abdication from HBO is supposed to be doing for Espinoza and his company today.

There is a notion, quaint and incorrect, that Cold War I was a bit more civil than the present version. Hey, didn’t HBO and Showtime both televise, via their pay-per-view arms, the Lennox Lewis-Tyson heavyweight megafight on June 8, 2002, in Memphis, Tenn.? Wasn’t that an indication that the two sides could play nice, at least once, if circumstances so dictated? And if it happened then, isn’t there still hope that a Mayweather –Manny Pacquiao fight somehow can be made for the good of the sport, present business allegiances notwithstanding?

King and Arum even occasionally got past their obvious personal differences, if there was enough money to be made on each side. They were photographed, smiling and shaking hands, when the matchup of Arum’s Oscar De La Hoya and King’s Felix Trinidad was made. OK, so those smiles were forced and fake. A very attractive superfight nonetheless was negotiated and took place. If it happened then, couldn’t it happen again? Wouldn’t it just be a matter of Arum and Schaefer sitting down together and somehow stowing away the animosity, or at least picking up a telephone and having a conversation? What might happen if Hershman and Espinoza bumped into each other at a coffee shop and, you know, sat down for a latte and a Danish? If Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill could have a summit meeting with Joe Stalin, isn’t a temporary boxing truce at least possible?

Duva said the idea that Arum-Schaefer somehow surpasses Arum-King, or even Arum-Dan Duva, for pure, unadulterated hatred is downright ludicrous. Those legendary feuders, the Hatfields and McCoys, had nothing on the feudin’ fight folks of two decades past.

Although Lewis-Tyson was a shared event (and, almost certainly, a one-of-a-kind thing never to be repeated), the counterpoint that underscores just how weird had gotten was the scheduling of two major fights on the same night in the same town – literally just down the street from each other — and at the same time. That, too, is something unprecedented and highly unlikely to ever happen again.

Remember what was supposed to happen on Nov. 4, 1995? HBO had announced the much-anticipated rubber match between Riddick Bowe and Evander Holyfield, which was to take place in the outdoor arena at Caesars Palace. Fox (not Showtime), meanwhile, had penciled in the matchup of Tyson, in his second comeback fight on the comeback trail against an opponent to be named (it would prove to be Buster Mathis Jr.) at the MGM Grand, just down the Las Vegas Strip.

Boxing’s answer to the Gunfight at the OK Corral, of course, didn’t happen. Bowe did fight Holyfield, “Big Daddy” winning on an eighth-round stoppage, but a few days before Tyson was to have fought Mathis, he appeared at a press conference to show the bandaged right thumb he supposedly had injured in sparring a couple of weeks earlier. At Tyson’s side were two doctors who held up X-rays and assured the media that the injury was indeed legitimate.

Duva, whose company co-promoted Bowe-Holyfield III, is one of many skeptics who continues to believe that, wink-wink, Tyson-Mathis (which was rescheduled and took place on Dec. 16, 1995, in Philadelphia) was pushed back not so much because of Tyson’s perhaps damaged thumb as because his likely blowout of Mathis was going to get killed at the box office by the more competitive and attractive third pairing of Bowe and Holyfield.

“I can’t remember who had first dibs on the date,” Duva said. “Back then I was the (Main Events) publicist and raising three kids, too. I can’t say I was paying that much attention to that stuff. That was Danny’s deal.”

But Duva has a much more vivid recollection of Lewis-Tyson, which might have resembled peace in our time between HBO and Showtime but was actually a raging fire fight involving guys in suits that somehow was kept out of the public’s eye.

“Everyone who was involved in that debacle – and `debacle’ is the only word to use – will tell you that, yes, it was an incredibly successful event,” she said. “It was incredibly successful from a financial standpoint. At the time it was the highest-viewed pay-per-view fight ever , so I have to be careful in parsing my comments. But everyone who was involved in it walked away saying, `We will NEVER do this again.’ It was a nightmare.

“Here’s the difference. Today, you are seeing on social media conversations that took place privately on the phone back then, when Dan and King and Arum hated each other’s guts on a level (Arum and Schaefer) don’t even come close to. It’s just that most people weren’t aware of how deep it went. But I was living through it.

“During that Lewis-Tyson promotion, they had to have a weekly conference call with all the lawyers that were involved, representing all the various entities just to hash out the legal issues. Those calls would last for two or three hours every Tuesday.

“You had lawyers literally arguing over who would bring the stool into the ring. I mean, crazy stuff. The Tyson and Lewis camps were trying to screw each other in so many ways, I can’t even begin to count them all.

“At one point we got a house for Lennox (Main Events was his U.S. promoter) to stay in when he got to Memphis,” Duva continued. “Next thing I know, Mike Tyson’s people rented him a house in the same neighborhood. We had a blowup over that.

“If you recall, there was a press conference where Tyson literally assaulted Lennox Lewis (and chewed on his thigh). There’s no other word for it. And they’re trying to put them in the same neighborhood? All we were trying to do was to keep them apart until the bell rang.”

Today’s technological advances, Duva figures, would have altered the landscape considerably.

“If there had been Twitter back then, you’d realize that what’s happening now with Arum and Richard Schaefer is, like, I don’t know, gentlemen playing cricket or something. But, as a publicist, all that nastiness would have made my job a lot easier.”

Part 2 of 3 will deal with how the HBO-Showtime divide is impacting the light heavyweight division, now and moving forward.

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Bernard Fernandez

A Wide-Ranging Conversation on the Ills of Boxing with Author/Journalist Sean Nam

Published

15 hours ago

March 5, 2025

Rick Assad

A-Wide-Ranging-Conversation-on-the-Ills-of-Boxing-with-Author/Journalist-Sean-Nam

During the last decade covering boxing, Sean Nam has tackled, without fear or favor, many interesting and thought-provoking subjects.

Nam’s feature on Ukrainian ringmaster Vasiliy Lomachenko, which ran in May 2024 in The Sunday Long Read, falls into this category. “I had been hearing whispers, mainly from Internet chatter, that Lomachenko had something of a contested reputation in his native Ukraine,” said Nam, who found it curious that Lomachenko draped the municipal flag of his hometown over his shoulders rather than the national flag of his country after defeating Richard Commey at Madison Square Garden. “[Those whispers] piqued my interest because that was not the narrative boxing consumers in the United States were given. ESPN, which has long showcased Lomachenko, ran a spot touting his bonafides as a beloved war hero.

“I figured someone from our media establishment, or whatever remains of that shambolic, penny-click bazaar, would write it up, but a year passed, and I didn’t come across anything close to attempting to dissect what was going on with Lomachenko and his country’s people.

“The response [to my story] was overwhelmingly positive. The general reaction was one of shock. I even had a lot of native Ukrainians thank me for shedding light on an admittedly angst-ridden situation; many of them saw their frustrations with Lomachenko reflected in the piece. I am eager to see how it all plays out for Lomachenko, who seems to be on the verge of retirement.”

At the urging of a fellow boxing writer, Nam, whose work has appeared in such periodicals as (British) Boxing News, USA Today, The Sweet Science, and Boxing Scene, found time to write a well-received first book, “Murder On Federal Street: Tyrone Everett, The Black Mafia, Fixed Fights And The Last Golden Age Of Philadelphia Boxing.”

“My close friend and mentor, the writer Carlos Acevedo, suggested it one day in an attempt to get me to write a book,” he said. “Carlos is also the reason I started writing about boxing in the first place.”

“Tyrone Everett is a more or less obscure name in boxing history, but the fact he was part of not just one, but two unsettling tragedies in the sport makes him a standout case – and this is a sport in which there is no shortage of sad stories,” he said. “Here was an opportunity, in other words, to present a story that had legitimate intrigue and, crucially, had not been over-chronicled.”

Philadelphia, which spawned such fighters as Joe Frazier, Bernard Hopkins, Bennie Briscoe, Matthew Saad Muhammad, Danny Garcia and Jaron “Boots” Ennis, has long been a hotbed of boxing talent.

“For a brief spell in the mid-1970s, Everett was a hot property on the sports scene of Philadelphia. His lone title shot, in 1976, against Alfredo Escalera, has long been considered one of the greatest ring injustices: Everett lost a decision despite seemingly out-boxing the Puerto Rican champion for the majority of the 15 rounds,” Nam said. “Noted ringside observers like Harold Lederman had Everett winning handily on their scorecards.”

Nam, who double-majored in English and philosophy at a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, went on: “Then there was the matter of Everett’s tragic death, six months later, at the hands of his live-in girlfriend, Carolyn McKendrick, who shot him in the face with a pistol. Everett was only 24 years old. The ensuing trial was a tabloid circus. Everett’s sexuality came under heavy scrutiny, as the lone witness to the shooting was a gay, crossdressing drug pusher, whom McKendrick and Everett had allegedly been in bed with on the morning of the shooting.…But Everett’s outré sexual habits were far from the only issues that were being dangled daily to the public. He was also accused of beating McKendrick and dealing drugs himself. In my book, I try to rectify some of the misconceptions that have come down to us over the years from that trial, while also playing up some of the street talk (i.e. the infamous Black Mafia) that most media at the time had snubbed.”

The fight game is a curious suitor but one that can entangle even the best and smartest of us.

“I suppose on some elemental level I enjoy watching people getting punched in the face, to put it somewhat glibly. (I don’t feel any need to over-intellectualize this.) If a poor schlub is getting the tar beat out of him by the proverbial favorite in the name of “good matchmaking,” I don’t see much there to enjoy, but when you have two skilled, evenly matched fighters, sometimes what happens inside the ropes approaches the sublime.

“A corollary to this is upsets. Since so much of boxing is engineered to produce outcomes favorable to the house fighter, when upsets happen, they almost seem like a miracle – a momentary glitch in the machine. Like when Andy Ruiz dethroned Anthony Joshua in 2019. Or consider a far more humble proceeding, an eight-round contest that took place this past year between Kurt Scoby and Dakota Linger.”

Nam talked about the particulars of that super lightweight bout.

“Scoby, the clear-cut A-side, was a ballyhooed prospect touted by his veteran promoter Lou DiBella as a future world champion and Linger was a little-known ham-and-egger from West Virginia, as crude and unheralded as they come,” he stated. “But Linger ended up stopping Scoby, seemingly with nothing more than a decent chin, above-average power, and stubbornness. Guys like Linger cut through all the hype and bull.”

Long before Las Vegas was the boxing capital of the world, New York City held that title.

“At risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, boxing in New York City has not been elite for a long time. It’s a joke, really. You can see this decline in both the amateur and pro ranks. (Indeed, the problem is interconnected.) The Daily News ditched the Golden Gloves brand and promoters seldom stage fights here anymore. By my count there were only 16 fights in the entire state of New York in 2023.

“Anecdotally, I’ve had conversations with a few amateur coaches who tell me that there has been a demonstrative drop-off in the talent level of the average open-class amateur boxer compared to even just 10 or 20 years ago. This goes back to what the historian Mike Silver argues persuasively in his book, ‘The Arc Of Boxing: The Rise And Decline Of The Sweet Science,’ that there needs to be a culture and industry in place for boxing to thrive, and we simply do not have that anymore. What drives this home are the ubiquitous, white-collar boutique boxing gyms that have popped up around the city. In the neoliberal hellscape of Manhattan today, there is no place for Jimmy Glenn’s Times Square Gym or Cus D’Amato’s Gramercy Gym.”

For the most part, boxing is doing well but there are always issues that prevent the sport from fully flourishing.

“For years promoters and their apparatchiks insisted that boxing was on the upswing. There was Premier Boxing Champions and its audacious play to bring boxing back to network television. There was Top Rank and their own rights deal with ESPN. And there was the UK-based Matchroom, which barged its way into the United States market with the backing of DAZN, the streaming platform that pledged a billion dollars to this crusade. All three outfits have essentially failed to see their initial prognostications pan out. PBC is running (underwhelming) shows exclusively on Amazon Prime, Top Rank seems to be winding down its deal with ESPN and has few if any fighters on its rosters that are legitimate stars, and DAZN (along with Matchroom), after bleeding more than two billion dollars, shifted its priorities to the UK. Golden Boy, which also has a deal with DAZN, seems to be one Ryan Garcia meltdown away from tottering into oblivion.

“Now we’re seeing similar pronouncements made about Saudi Arabian chieftain Turki Alalshikh, who has quickly established himself as the savior du jour.

Major fights have been made under Alalshikh’s dictates, but is boxing healthy?

I fail to see how a sport that is being artificially propped up by a totalitarian state, with numerous human rights abuses can be considered healthy. Once the spigot is turned off – and I assure you, it most certainly will – the sport will be worse off than before.”

In year’s past, there was one champion for each weight class. Now there are multiple boxers holding titles in one weight class.

“Of course there are too many champions in a single division. It is also true that this problem, diagnosed and groused about by every forum poster, blogger, journalist, and talking head, is the biggest fig leaf in the sport. Of all the jeremiads one could come up with, the ones leveled at the alphabet soup organizations are the most fatuous and exist at this point none other than to flatter the fancies of would-be moralizers,” Nam said.

“Sanctioning bodies are a problem, sure, but they are simply a symptom of a larger predicament, the sport’s inherent fragmentation. I don’t mean to sound fatalistic, but boxing’s problems are not going to go away because the WBA decides to do away with their “interim” championship belts or that every major promotional outfit starts to adhere to the rankings of The Ring magazine.”

Nam continued: “A couple of years ago I broke a story that examined the conduct between the WBA and a promoter. Using legal transcripts and business documents, I showed how, by all appearances, a promoter was paying the sanctioning body to gain favorable rankings for his fighters in a brazen pay-to-play scheme,” he said. “What happened? In any other sport there may have been a reckoning of sorts. Maybe 30 years ago the federal government might have given this a looksee. I was informed that a remonstration of sorts was coming my way. But the WBA to my knowledge never ended up responding to the points made in the article. That turned out to be a canny move. Keeping quiet actually helped defang the story. The episode highlighted a few things, chiefly of which is that, in the absence of a legitimate judicial apparatus in boxing, there are simply no consequences in the sport.”

Perhaps someone to oversee boxing would help, but this isn’t likely to happen.

“Boxing needs more than a commissioner to cure it of its myriad chronic illnesses. Would it help? Maybe. But I have a hard time believing that any meaningful form of organization will materialize in the sport anytime soon, in part because all the key industry players, i.e. the promoters, managers, and network executives, are not interested in reforming it to begin with,” Nam said. “The appeal of the sport has to do with its fundamentally decentralized nature, the fact that there is no barrier to entry and that, in theory, anyone with cash to burn and some patience, can end up with a staggering windfall.

“Ironically, boxing, despite its increasingly marginalized status, still remains a capitalist juggernaut, capable of generating obscene sums of money in a single night, with very little regulatory oversight. It’s a breeding ground for lowlifes, not surprisingly. I don’t see any meaningful change happening in the sport on the structural level. Even though there are a ton of things the individual state commissions can do to shore up the sport, that really only goes for the strong ones, like New York or California. Promoters can simply bop over to a more lenient one, a regulatory backwater like Oklahoma or Florida. That’s exactly what Eddie Hearn did recently with Conor Benn.”

This is what boxing is and what boxing does, and despite its various and sundry problems, it still captures our imagination.

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Boxing Odds and Ends: Mikaela Mayer on Jonas vs. Price and More

Published

2 days ago

March 4, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Boxing-Odds-and-Ends-Mikaela-Mayer-on-Jonas-vs-Price-and-More

The marquee match on this week’s fight docket takes place on Friday at London’s historic Royal Albert Hall where Natasha Jonas (16-2-1, 9 KOs) meets Lauren Price (9-0, 2 KOs). At stake are three of the four meaningful pieces of the female world welterweight title.

Price, an Olympic gold medalist in Tokyo and arguably the best all-around female athlete ever from Wales, holds the WBC and IBF versions of the title. Liverpool’s Jonas, unbeaten in her last seven since losing a narrow decision to Katie Taylor, holds the WBA belt.

Southern California native Mikaela Mayer owns the other piece of the 147-pound puzzle. If Mayer can get over her next hump – a rematch with Sandy Ryan – she would be in line to fight the Price-Jonas winner for the undisputed title. She and Ryan will collide on the 29^th of this month on a Top Rank card at the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas.

We caught up with Mikaela yesterday (Monday, Feb. 3) after she had finished a strenuous workout at the DLX Gym in Las Vegas to get her thoughts on the Jonas-Price encounter. Mikaela has a history with Jonas. They fought in January of last year on Jonas’s turf in Liverpool and Mayer came out on the short end of a very close and somewhat controversial decision.

Price is favored in the 4/1 range. To the oddsmakers, it matters greatly that there is a 10-year gap in their ages. Natasha Jonas turned 40 last year. However, Mayer, who would tell you that female boxers as a rule peak later than men (they take less damage because they don’t hit as hard and they absorb fewer punches fighting two-minute rounds) believes that the odds are askew.

“In my mind, this is a 50/50 fight,” she says. “Price’s former opponents were right there to be hit. Jonas doesn’t have a lot of wear and tear and I believe she has better spatial awareness inside the ring. The key will be if she can handle Price’s movement. I can see Price winning but, in my mind, she is no shoo-in. I think it will be a close fight.”

Carson Jones

Bobby Dobbs, the former manager of Carson Jones, has set up a Go Fund Me page in the name of Jones’ mother to defray the boxer’s funeral expenses. The Oklahoma City journeyman, active as recently as 2023, passed away on Feb. 28 at age 38 following an operation for achalasia, a rare swallowing disorder.

We are reminded that among Jones’ 38 wins was a match that originally went into the books as a “no-decision.” Nowadays, it’s no big surprise when a victory is amended to a “no-decision” – the adjudication usually comes after the fact because of a failed drug test – but the opposite is very uncommon.

The bout in question happened on May 5, 2011 in a hotel ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Jones was defending his USBA welterweight title against Ohio campaigner Michael Clark.

In the second round, Jones landed a punch that hit Clark in the family jewels and Clark wasn’t able to continue. The Oklahoma commission overturned the “no-decision” upon learning that Clark had forgot to bring his groin protector.

Fighter of the Month

The TSS Fighter of the Month for February is Keyshawn Davis who unseated WBO lightweight champion Denys Berinchyk on Bob Arum’s Valentine’s Day card before a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden’s Hulu Theater. It was the first world title for Davis, the former Olympic silver medalist who had the noted trainer Brian “Bomac” McIntyre in his corner.

Davis was a solid favorite. At age 36, his Ukrainian opponent had a lot of mileage on his odometer (Berinchyk purportedly had in the vicinity of 400 amateur fights). However, Berinchyk was also undefeated (19-0) and wasn’t expected to be such an easy mark.

Davis decked Berinchyk with a left hook to the liver in the third round and ended the contest with the same punch, only harder, in the next frame.

A pre-fight story in Forbes called Keyshawn Davis a mega-star on the cusp. It remains to be seen if he has the personality to transcend the sport, but one thing that’s certain is that he has made great gains since his Oct. 14, 2023 bout in Rosenberg, Texas with Nahir Albright. That fight went the full “10” and although Davis won, it transmuted into a “no-decision” after he tested positive for marijuana, a substance banned by the hidebound Texas commission.

Ketchel

A note from matchmaker, booking agent, and boxing historian Bruce Kielty informs us that the Polish Historical Society of Grand Rapids, Michigan, is $1,025 short of the $2,000 required to produce a new concrete base at the tombstone of Stanley Ketchel at Grand Rapids Holy Cross Cemetery.

Ketchel, the fabled “Michigan Assassin,” was born Stanislaw Kiecel in Grand Rapids in 1886. A two-time world middleweight champion, he was the premier knockout artist of his era, scoring 46 of his 49 wins inside the distance.

Ketchel was murdered in 1910 while staying at the ranch of a wealthy friend near Springfield, Missouri. The great sportswriter John Lardner revisited the incident and Ketchel’s tumultuous career in a widely anthologized 1954 story for True magazine. Lardner’s opening sentence is considered by some aficionados to be the best lede ever in a sports story: “Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.”

The collar of Ketchel’s tombstone is cracked, weather-damaged, and falling apart. Any donation, however small, is welcomed. Contributions made by check should include the note “Ketchel Monument.” The address is Polish Historical Society, P.O. Box 1844, Grand Rapids, MI 49501.

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Lamont Roach holds Tank Davis to a Draw in Brooklyn

Published

4 days ago

March 2, 2025

David A. Avila

Lamont Roach holds Tank Davis to a Draw in Brooklyn

They just know each other, too well.

Longtime neighborhood rivals Gervonta “Tank” Davis and Lamont Roach met on the biggest stage and despite 12 rounds of back-and-forth action could not determine a winner as the WBA lightweight title fight was ruled a majority draw on Saturday.

The title does not change hands.

Davis (30-0-1, 28 KOs) and Roach (25-1-2, 10 KOs) no longer live and train in the same Washington D.C. hood, but even in front of a large crowd at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, they could not distinguish a clear winner.

“We grew up in the sport together,” explained Davis who warned fans of Roach’s abilities.

Davis entered the ring defending the WBA lightweight title and Roach entered as a WBA super featherweight titlist moving up a weight division. Davis was a large 10-1 favorite according to oddsmakers.

The first several rounds were filled with feints and stance reshuffling for a tactical advantage. Both tested each other’s reflexes and counter measures to determine if either had picked up any new moves or gained new power.

Neither champion wanted to make a grave error.

“I was catching him with some clean shots. But he kept coming so I didn’t want to make no mistakes,” said Davis of his cautionary approach.

By the third round Davis opened-up with a more aggressive approach, especially with rocket lefts. Though some connected, Roach retaliated with counters to offset Davis’s speedy work. It was a theme repeated round after round.

Roach had never been knocked out and showed a very strong chin even against his old pal. He also seemed to know exactly where Davis would be after unloading one of his patented combinations and would counter almost every time with precise blows.

It must have been unnerving for Davis.

Back and forth they exchanged and during one lightning burst by Davis, his rival countered perfectly with a right that shook and surprised Davis.

Davis connected often with shots to the body and head, but Roach never seemed rattled or stunned. Instead, he immediately countered with his own blows and connected often.

It was bewildering.

In a strange moment at the beginning of the ninth round, after a light exchange of blows Davis took a knee and headed to his corner to get his face wiped. It was only after the fight completed that he revealed hair product was stinging his eye. That knee gesture was not called a knockdown by the referee Steve Willis.

“It should be a knockdown. But I’m not banking on that knockdown to win,” said Roach.

The final three rounds saw each fighter erupt with blinding combinations only to be countered. Both fighters connected but remained staunchly upright.

“For sure Lamont is a great fighter, he got the skills, punching power it was a learned lesson,” said Davis after the fight.

Both felt they had won the fight but are willing to meet again.

“I definitely thought I won, but we can run it back,” said Roach who beforehand told fans and experts he could win the fight. “I got the opportunity to show everybody.”

He also showed a stunned crowd he was capable of at least a majority draw after 12 back-and-forth rounds against rival Davis. One judge saw Davis the winner 115-113 but two others saw it 114-114 for the majority draw.

“Let’s have a rematch in New York City. Let’s bring it back,” said Davis.

Imagine, after 20 years or so neighborhood rivals Davis and Roach still can’t determine who is better.

Other Bouts

Gary Antuanne Russell (18-1, 17 KOs) surprised Jose “Rayo” Valenzuela (14-3, 9 KOs) with a more strategic attack and dominated the WBC super lightweight championship fight between southpaws to win by unanimous decision after 12 rounds.

If Valenzuela expected Russell to telegraph his punches like Isaac Cruz did when they fought in Los Angeles, he was greatly surprised. The Maryland fighter known for his power rarely loaded up but simply kept his fists in Valenzuela’s face with short blows and seldom left openings for counters.

It was a heady battle plan.

It wasn’t until the final round that Valenzuela was able to connect solidly and by then it was too late. Russell’s chin withstood the attack and he walked away with the WBC title by unanimous decision.

Despite no knockdowns Russell was deemed the winner 119-109 twice and 120-108.

“This is a small stepping stone. I’m coming for the rest of the belts,” said Russell. “In this sport you got to have a type of mentality and he (Valenzuela) brought it out of me.”

Dominican Republic’s Alberto Puello (24-0, 10 KOs) won the battle between slick southpaws against Spain’s Sandor Martin (42-4,15 KOs) by split decision to keep the WBC super lightweight in a back-and-forth struggle that saw neither able to pull away.

Though Puello seemed to have the faster hands Martin’s defense and inside fighting abilities gave the champion problems. It was only when Puello began using his right jab as a counter-punch did he give the Spanish fighter pause.

Still, Martin got his licks in and showed a very good chin when smacked by Puello. Once he even shook his head as if to say those power shots can’t hurt me.

Neither fighter ever came close to going down as one judge saw Martin the winner 115-113, but two others favored Puello 115-113, 116-112 who retains the world title by split decision.

Cuba’s Yoenis Tellez (10-0, 7 KOs) showed that his lack of an extensive pro resume could not keep him from handling former champion Julian “J-Rock” Williams (29-5-1) by unanimous decision to win an interim super welterweight title.

Tellez had better speed and sharp punches especially with the uppercuts. But he ran out of ideas when trying to press and end the fight against the experienced Williams. After 12 rounds and no knockdowns all three judges saw Tellez the winner 119-109, 118-110, 117-111.

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