For many, a fight between Gervonta “Tank” Davis and Shakur Stevenson is one of the best that can be made in the sport – and that was before this week’s bad-blooded exchanges on social media.
However, often the biggest fights are waited on so that they are perhaps commercial juggernauts but the fighters do not meet at a point when the contest would be at its hottest.
Stevenson, promoted by Top Rank, is set to fight at home in Newark, New Jersey, on July 6 while Davis is a PBC boxer who is scheduled to box Frank Martin on June 15 in Las Vegas.
Top Rank president Todd duBoef was asked by BoxingScene whether it was inevitable that one day Tank and Stevenson would meet.
“I hope so, I think it makes sense,” duBoef said. “I think those weight classes between [1]30 and [1]40 pounds are brilliant. I think there’s a lot of moving and shaking going on there. I think they are all touching the weight classes and can touch all of them – their size is good enough that they can drop in weight to lose three to five pounds, and move up in weight to gain three to five pounds. So I think there’s a lot of fun that can be done there. But we’ve got to get everybody’s expectations to the table.
“We can talk about, ‘One day, [Oscar] De La Hoya and [Felix] Trinidad were going to fight again, they were going to do a rematch,’ ‘one day [Floyd Mayweather and De La Hoya were going to do a rematch,’ and you don’t want it to be the [Mike] Tyson-[Lennox] Lewis situation, where it was one day but one day too long.”
The 26-year-old WBC lightweight champion Stevenson (21-0, 10 KOs) is returning to the Prudential Center on the back of a drab points win over Edwin De Los Santos in a fight that failed to dazzle.
DuBoef insisted that Newark is a key component of the Shakur Stevenson business moving forwards.
“We always believed in hometowns, right?” duBoef said. “We’ve always loved hometowns, and dating back to when Floyd [Mayweather Jr.] fought in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I put the fighting Mayweathers there, and then he fought after his first title defense … to Miguel Cotto being in Puerto Rico at least once a year. … It’s always good to do that; it’s not good to disconnect, you know?
“If the Lakers never played in L.A. and they were always in San Francisco and Dallas, you’d be like, ‘Wait a second, it doesn’t make sense.’
“So I think it’s nice to have a natural place, natural fight audience, great base – that’s New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts areas, such a fertile ground for fight fans. So we love just being out east.
“I think he’s one of the great fighters in today’s day and age – people appreciate that and they’ll show up.”
Tris Dixon covered his first amateur boxing fight in 1996. The former editor of Boxing News, he has written for a number of international publications and newspapers, including GQ and Men’s Health, and is a Board member for the Ringside Charitable Trust and The Ring of Brotherhood. He is a former boxing broadcaster for TNT Sports and hosts the popular Boxing Life Stories podcast. Dixon is a British Boxing Hall of Famer, an International Boxing Hall of Fame elector, is on The Ring ratings panel and the author of five boxing books, including Damage: The Untold Story of Brain Trauma in Boxing, Warrior: A Champion’s Search For His Identity and The Road to Nowhere: A Journey Through Boxings’ Wastelands.