Gervonta Davis knocked out Ryan Garcia with a withering body shot in the seventh round of their eagerly awaited summit meeting on Saturday night, delivering a signature performance in the year’s most anticipated fight that conferred his status as the face of American boxing.
The 28-year-old three-division champion, nicknamed Tank, sent Garcia to the canvas in the second round before finishing him off in the seventh with a perfect uppercut to the ribs in front of a capacity crowd at the T-Mobile Arena along the Las Vegas Strip.
“I remember coming up in the Golden Gloves and seeing [Floyd Mayweather Jr] fight at the MGM,” said Davis, the Baltimore native who improved to 29 wins in as many fights with all but two ending inside the distance. “It was crazy. I actually just saw Rihanna perform at the Super Bowl, and I thought that’s going to be me one day. And we’re here.”
The showdown between two unbeaten American knockout artists early in their primes, represented by warring companies and broadcasters, was one of the biggest matches that could be made in boxing today. It lived up to the considerable hype, with moments of two-way drama in the opening stages lifting the divided crowd into frenzy until Davis’s overall class won out.
No titles were on the line in the scheduled 12-round bout, which took place at a catchweight of 136lbs, but the stakes could hardly have been higher. Already an emerging mainstream attraction, Davis moves forward as the sport’s biggest star in the United States with all the benefits, bragging rights and earning potential that entails, even as he faces the prospect of jail time stemming from a November 2020 hit-and-run.
“I’m definitely the face of boxing,” Davis said. “Abso-fucking-lutely.”
Garcia (23-1, 19 KOs), the 24-year-old from Orange County who lives in Los Angeles, was fast out of his corner and aggressive from the opening bell, throwing jabs and straights to the head and body while pressing his advantages of four and a half inches in height and two and a half inches in reach. Davis, a southpaw endowed with concussive power in both hands, barely threw a punch in the first three minutes while patiently taking his opponent’s measure.
Davis (29-0, 27 KOs) appeared to be hurt early in the second after Garcia landed a combination along the ropes. But that’s when Davis caught his foe with a flush counter-left upstairs that dumped Garcia to the seat of his trunks and brought the crowd of 20,842 to their feet.
“I thought I had him pretty hurt to be honest,” Garcia said. “But that’s what I get. I was impatient and I got caught. I ran into an overhand left.”
Garcia appeared sturdy after beating the count, made it to the bell and continued to press to open the third round, but he was more hesitant after tasting Davis’s notorious power. By the fourth, Davis was backing up Garcia steadily in a complete reversal of the opening minutes. His unpredictable array of feints and upper-body movement kept Garcia off balance and reactive into the fifth and sixth, where the gulf in skill and experience between the pair became even more evident.
Then came the seventh, when Davis detonated a straight left hand to Garcia’s liver in that sent his foe reeling backward into a neutral corner and down to his right knee, breathless. He remained there as referee Thomas Taylor picked up the 10-count, then waved it off when Garcia didn’t make it to his feet in time.
“I couldn’t breathe,” said Garcia, who connected on 39 of 164 shots (23.8%) compared to 35 of 103 for Davis (34.0%), according to Compubox’s punch statistics. “I don’t want to make no excuses in here. I just couldn’t recover and that’s it. He caught me with a good body shot, snuck underneath and he caught me good.”
Davis has moved the needle like few other American boxers in recent memory, winning belts at 126lbs, 130lbs and 135lbs while selling out arenas from coast to coast. But while the Marylander’s professional resume held up better than Garcia’s, the plain fact was each man was still in search of a career-defining win and was in with the best opponent of his career on Saturday night. It was a risky proposition for both fighters and one that paid off handsomely for Davis in a long-awaited grudge match preceded by nearly two years of trash talk and ill will.
“I know we talked a lot of trash leading into the fight, but [Davis] knows what it is,” said Garcia after absorbing the first defeat of his 24-fight professional career. “It’s all love at the end of the day. I was honored to be in the ring with a great fighter and I respect him a lot.”
Davis’s win could set the stage for a lightweight showdown with Devin Haney, who has consolidated all four major title belts at 135lbs and faces Vasiliy Lomachenko next month. But his immediate future is up in the air after he entered a guilty plea in January to four counts stemming from a hit-and-run which left four people hospitalized, including a pregnant woman. After the judge overseeing the case rejected a plea deal that would have allowed him to serve 60 days of unsupervised home detention, Davis faces the real prospect of jail time at his sentencing on 5 May.
His legal troubles don’t end there. Davis, whose history of gender-based violence is well-documented, has another court date next month in Florida after a December incident in which he was accused of battery (the plaintiff, the mother of Davis’s daughter, has since filed an affadavit requesting to have the charges dismissed).
But for now, Davis can bask in the glow of his career-best triumph after further building on the promise first made clear six years ago, when he became boxing’s second-youngest world champion at just 22 years old.
“The reality definitely matches the dream,” Davis said. “But the job is never done until I retire so I’m going to keep my head down, stay humble and continue to work.”
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