THE NOSEBLEEDS AT BARCLAYS CENTER — A fighter can’t call a timeout in boxing. Unless, that is, you’re Gervonta "Tank" Davis.
Because in the heat of battle during the ninth round of a shockingly fabulous and dramatic WBA lightweight title fight Saturday night, against underdog challenger Lamont Roach in Brooklyn, Davis did just that. And he got away with it. Then again, this fight was full of the unexpected, not least of which was the majority draw the judges gave the fight after 12 fascinating rounds. The Barclays Center crowd, which was very pro-Davis at the beginning of the night, booed loudly when the decision was announced, knowing the champ had been saved by the referee and feeling Roach was robbed on the scorecards.
Like a majority of the folks who packed the arena to the rafters, I bought tickets mostly just to let my kids see Davis on the job—and to be in the presence of greatness. Davis has the power of a heavyweight in a lightweight’s body. He’d knocked out 28 of his 30 opponents coming in, and had never lost a bout or even been knocked down. I was damn sure I’d see Davis get another KO and do a celebratory backflip off the ropes, both of which have become staples of Davis fight nights on his way to becoming, as he labels himself, the face of boxing.
But thanks to Roach and referee Steve Willis, we got something else entirely. Roach, a massive underdog who moved up a weight class to try and take Davis’s lightweight belt, withstood the champ’s best shots and landed power punches of his own like no previous opponent ever had.
Davis and Roach have a past. Davis grew up in Baltimore, Roach just a few dozen miles south in Washington, D.C., and the two fought each other as youngsters on the Golden Gloves circuit. Since turning pro, both have trained for years at the same gyms.
Perhaps this familiarity with his opponent explains why Roach didn’t fall for Davis’s laid-back routine in the opening rounds, or any of the other traps that the champ set for him. Prior Davis foes Ryan Garcia and Frank Martin, for example, got overly confident and aggressive early in their matches, and both paid for those mistakes with their health. Roach stayed at a distance from Davis, yet a hefty percentage of his jabs and occasional combos still found their target. Davis was winning the opening rounds on the cards, but Roach’s discipline and accuracy while sticking to his pick-and-choose punch-throwing plan—plus Davis’s inability to land any night-ending haymaker to the body or chin—seemed to get deeper into Davis’s head by the minute.
By the middle of the fight, Davis was spending far too much time and energy jabbering at Roach or complaining to the referee, and throwing too many low blows for them to be accidental. Davis was also getting hit a whole lot. Roach began landing more head shots, in fact, than I’d ever seen Tank take. Davis was obviously rocked by both a straight right counter and a left uppercut in the eighth round.
Then things got crazy. About 40 seconds into the ninth round, just after Roach landed a strong right cross to Davis’s left eye, the champ backed off, made a quick glance at referee Willis, and took a knee.
Inside the arena, confusion reigned. Something big was up, and whatever it was was bad for the champ. Thrilled shrieks filled the arena. From my seat in the last row of the end zone high atop Barclays, my first thought was that Davis must have been thumbed in the eye, and figured the safe move would be to take a pause and give up the point that would surely be deducted for a knockdown. That would be a cagey veteran strategy. But as Willis ordered Roach to a neutral corner and walked toward Davis to start counting him out, the champ hustled over to his own corner and had a second wipe his head and face with a towel. The scene was hard for boxing fans to process, because everybody knows fighters can't call their own timeouts, and getting assistance in the ring in the middle of a round can be grounds for disqualification. No way Tank, being a cagey veteran, would risk that.
Willis looked as stunned by what took place as anybody in the arena full of screamers. Davis turned back to the ring, ready to fight, and replays showed he yelled "Jelly!" at the referee while tapping his noggin. Willis is an occasional stand-up comedian outside the ring; on this night, the joke was on Roach. Willis just let the fight continue: no point for a knockdown, no DQ, no punishment for Davis at all.
While the disorder and confusion of the ninth round weren’t great from a boxing standpoint, they added so much dramatic impact. The volume inside Barclays went from loud to deafening, and the mood from mayhem to absolutely gladiatorial.
Davis is my favorite fighter by a wide margin. I’ve followed his career since meeting him about a decade ago at a workout at Bald Eagle Recreation Center, a D.C. facility that is, in my opinion, likely the greatest public boxing gym in the country. He told me he was headed straight for trouble before being "saved" by Floyd Mayweather, who moved him from Baltimore to Las Vegas and took him under his wing. (Davis and Mayweather have since fallen out in a big way.) I’ve been in awe of his trainer, Barry Hunter, since I wrote about the youth boxing club he ran in D.C. in 2002. I was living across the street from the junior high school where Hunter’s fight club was based at the time, and to me the guy was a hero and, call it cliché if you wish, literally saving lives. At least one of the kids that I saw fight in the school’s furnace room on Hunter’s watch, Lamont Peterson, grew up to be a world champ.
So I had my biases at the beginning of the fight. Yet I was yelling like a madman for Roach after Davis took a knee, as was nearly everybody else in the arena! We wondered if we were witnessing an upset on the order of David vs. Goliath, even if in this case both combatants weighed 135 pounds.
Davis finished the ninth round with an air of desperation and an obviously revved-up motor, while Roach kicked into a higher gear of his own in response. It felt like both fighters landed and survived a few fights worth of power punches in the final few rounds. Roach, unknown to all but hardcore fight fans coming in, had the upper hand over one of the greatest fighters of his generation. When the bell rang ended the 12th round and the fight, Davis’s dethroning appeared imminent.
But after a short pause, ring announcer Jimmy Lennon Jr. told everybody otherwise. Judge Eric Marlinski had scored the bout 115-113 for Davis, while Steve Weisfeld and Glenn Feldman had it even at 114-114. That makes it a draw. Davis retained his title, but his career record has its first blemish.
Davis said in his postfight press conference that he’d recently visited a hair stylist, and the combination of sweat and hair care products were blinding him. So he felt he had to take a break for the sake of safety. He claimed he was unaware that the rules forbade him from doing that.
"I didn't want to get caught while my eyes were burning," Davis said. "You know, you can get knocked out like that. So I'd rather take a knee. But I didn’t know you can get disqualified for all that. When [Willis] started counting, I'm like, What the hell?"
Had referee Willis rightly counted Davis taking a knee as a knockdown, the ninth round likely would have been scored 10-8 in Roach’s favor on all cards, and, all else staying the same, changed the overall verdict from draw to a unanimous decision for Roach.
Afterward, Roach let others complain for him. He used his presser to say he was grateful for the opportunity to prove that he deserved to share a ring with an all-timer like Tank Davis.
"I thought I won, I thought I did enough to get the victory over a spectacular fighter," Roach said. "I told y'all from the beginning that I got the skills to pay the motherfucking bills. I've been telling y'all that and and I'm just glad I got to show it, honestly."
They say in sports that ties are like kissing your sister. But in this case, a tie increases the likelihood that we’ll get more of what we already got. And what we got was great. Both Davis and Roach appeared eager to get another shot at each other. Davis wants redemption. Roach wants justice and a belt. He said afterward, "I can’t wait to dance again."
