Is Gervonta Davis Boxing’s New “Money” Man?

This past Saturday, June 26, Gervonta “Tank” Davis scored an 11^th-round stoppage over previously undefeated Mario Barrios at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta. With cornerman Floyd Mayweather Jr offering advice and encouragement, Davis won his fourth title in his third weight division.

The 26-year-old Davis is an outstanding talent, but winning titles in multiple divisions doesn’t wow us, not with 17 weight classes and the WBA tossing around titles like confetti. However, we stood up and took notice when Showtime announced that the fight was fought before a sellout crowd of 16,570 – this in a city where professional boxing has been relatively moribund since the heyday of Atlanta’s own Evander Holyfield.

Perhaps we should have seen this coming. On Dec. 28, 2019, Davis drew 14,129 at this same venue for a less attractive match with Yuriorkis Gamboa and with a competing attraction playing out roughly a mile down the road, the Peach Bowl, where LSU and Oklahoma played to a Peach Bowl record 78,347. (One could have taken in both attractions as the football game was over before the Davis-Gamboa fight started, but the football game overlapped with the undercard and it’s doubtful that many people took in both events as the fastest way to get from one venue to the other was by foot.)

Several years ago, Mayweather Promotions CEO Leonard Ellerbe predicted that Gervonta Davis would be the next fighter to rake in “Mayweather money” over the course of his career. We wrote that off as promoter-talk. For one thing, it didn’t strike us that Gervonta had the personality to transcend his sport. With gloves off, he had no charisma whatsoever.

But charisma, I have come to learn, is in the eye of the beholder. And as a guy from a white neighborhood who grew up in the horse-and-buggy age (translation: before home computers), I will never understand how some people – shallow people, by my reckoning — got to become “influencers.”

That puts me in the same league with the great boxing promoter Bob Arum who readily concedes that he did a poor job of promoting Mayweather who signed with Arum at age 19 coming out of the amateur ranks and stayed with Arum’s company through his first 35 pro fights.

Under Arum, Mayweather was “Pretty Boy,” a hackneyed nickname. When he freed himself from Arum’s “chokehold” (his word) he morphed into “Money,” a nickname that rubbed old-timers the wrong way and that was the whole purpose. Flaunting his wealth, he became a villain, but not among the hip-hop crowd with which he identified. And there was money waiting to be plumbed from the hip-hop crowd which Arum could not foresee. Indeed, after leaving Arum, Mayweather participated in six of the top 10 fights in Nevada boxing history as measured by gate receipts and in the process accumulated enough money to live like a Maharajah.

In Atlanta this past Saturday, the crowd erupted when Gervonta Davis came out of his dressing room with the rapper Lil Baby leading the procession. I wouldn’t have recognized Lil Baby (birth name Dominique Armani Jones) if he had been sitting across from me in my living room, but that’s irrelevant. Lil Baby is hot right now having recently won the BET award for Best Male Hip Hop Artist. By associating with the rapper, who lives in Atlanta where Davis owns a home, the boxer was “building his brand” as his mentor Floyd Mayweather Jr would have put it.

In common with Floyd, Gervonta has had some brushes with the law. He was charged with two counts of misdemeanor battery after he was caught on camera getting rough with his former girlfriend, the mother of his child, at a celebrity basketball game in Miami in February. Last we checked, he had 14 misdemeanor counts pending relating to a late-night incident in Baltimore when the Lamborghini he was driving ran a red light and was involved in a hit-and-run accident.

Floyd Mayweather’s misdeeds never seriously damaged his core fan base – or if they did, a horde of new fans quickly filled the breach — so one assumes that Gervonta’s brushes with the legal system, so long as they stay in the misdemeanor range —  won’t seriously dent his chances of becoming the new Mayweather, i.e., the sport’s biggest earner.

One didn’t have to be a fan of Floyd Mayweather Jr to appreciate his ring artistry. The same goes for Gervonta Davis who isn’t the defensive wizard that Floyd was, but is a rare talent.

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By the way, although the turnout for Davis-Barrios was certainly impressive, it paled beside the turnout at the 1998 fight in Atlanta between Evander Holyfield and Vaughn Bean. Holyfield was at the peak of his popularity, having stopped Michael Moorer in a title unification fight after back-to-back victories over Mike Tyson. Staged in the Georgia Dome, home of the Falcons, that fight drew 41,357. The concessionaire selling binoculars to folks in the cheap seats reportedly did a brisk business.

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