Ryan Hafey/Premier Boxing Champions
NEW YORK – Gervonta “Tank” Davis is a box office star, a fact reinforced Saturday when 18,970 customers—“Paying customers,” noted Mayweather Promotions CEO Leonard Ellerbe—crammed into Barclays Center to watch Davis flatten Rolando Romero by sixth-round knockout. Madonna was there. Tracy Morgan, too. Notable fighters from Errol Spence Jr. to Shakur Stevenson made the trip. It was the highest grossing boxing event in the building’s 10-year history—event organizers anticipate the gate revenue to approach $5 million—and irrefutable evidence that Davis, who has already packed houses in Baltimore, Atlanta and L.A., is one of the biggest draws in the sport.
Tank Davis is not a boxing star, not yet anyway, and a highlight-reel stoppage of Romero won’t get him there. Tank’s social media cartel will twist Romero into a quality win, as if Rolly’s sterling record wasn’t the result of careful matchmaking (hello, Arturs Ahmetovs), late replacements (Anthony Yigit, Avery Sparrow) and horrifying judging (paging Jackson Mariñez). Romero wasn’t the stumblebum that oddsmakers pegged him as going in but his lunging style was always going to leave him exposed to the kind of crushing counter Tank clipped him with. Afterwards, Ellerbe declared Romero to be the second-best 135-pounder in the division. Somewhere George Kambosos, Devin Haney and Vasyl Lomachenko are still laughing.
