We first spoke 10 years ago. Gervonta “Tank” Davis was 19 years old, a featherweight prospect who was 8-0 with 8 knockouts, about to make his television debut, and excited to move further forward in a sport that had taken him off the streets of Baltimore.
Now Davis is 30 years old, 30-0 with 28 knockouts, and one of the most popular boxers in the United States.
And he says he’s ready to step away.
The word Davis uses is “retirement.” Perhaps it will wind up being more like a break. But it has been quite a journey for someone who first laced up the gloves at the age of seven, started competing at eight, has been a professional prizefighter for nearly 12 years now — and is ready to focus on other things.
“Am I’ma miss it, or is it probably about time for me to, like, slow down my life?” Davis told me on Thursday, following a press conference in D.C. ahead of his pay-per-view bout against Lamont Roach Jnr, which will take place on March 1 in Brooklyn.
“I’ve been living on a fast pace for so long,” Davis said. “It’s about time for me to, like, slow down and better myself [in a way] other than boxing. If I can take this break and better myself as a person, as a father, as a brother, as everything, fix myself as a whole. I should do that.”
Earlier this week, at a press conference in New York City, Davis mentioned his desire to enter therapy. How did he come to the realization that seeking professional help would be, well, helpful?
“It’s stuff that I catch myself doing,” Davis said. “I would do it and then I would go back and correct myself. I’d be like, ‘If I didn’t have this in me, it wouldn’t have happened.’ I wouldn’t have snapped if I wouldn’t have had the mean side in me, or I could handle it in a better way than the way I went about it. I got kids now, so I don’t wanna snap on my daughter. I feel as if I can remove everything and work on myself, like going back to school, getting therapy and moving on, getting my business stuff in order, I feel like as though that would change me as a man. I feel like that would build me more than a boxer.”
Davis has had legal issues over the years, including one incident of domestic violence at a charity basketball game that was caught on video. He was also arrested in other alleged cases, though those charges were ultimately dropped.
To be clear: In our interview on Thursday, Davis wasn’t specifically referring to violence, but rather to handling his anger better in general.
And, to him, he can’t do that while also competing at a high level in the ring.
“I still got to build myself up and be angry to fight,” Davis said. “That’s like contradicting myself.”
That anger comes from a very difficult childhood.
“Being betrayed, everything I’ve been through,” he said. “That’s me now just trying to separate myself from it. I’m trying to move further and further away from where I come from.”
He explained that childhood more in-depth in our 2014 conversation, which can be seen in full here on YouTube:
“I got into boxing because I was fighting. I come from a dark background. I was in foster care and group homes and stuff because my mom was on drugs and stuff like that. So my grandma got me back from foster care. I started school. I was in a new neighborhood. So I was a new kid on the block, and I was light-skinned and I was short, so I had to fight a lot. I had to fight at school. I had to fight on the block. So one time my uncle seen me fight, and he was like he wanted to turn it into something positive, so he took me to the gym.”
Well before Davis became the star he is today, boxing played a positive role in his life — among the reasons that so many boxing programs throughout the United States work with struggling kids and teens.
“I could’ve been in jail. I could’ve been dead,” Davis said in 2014. “I came from a dark background. I was coming from, like, the ghetto. It’s like a 75% chance that something can happen to you in the neighborhood.”
Instead, he said, boxing took him off the streets. His team convinced him to return to school and get his high school diploma, to do things that would better his chances in life in general.
Boxing clearly gave Davis a much better life, both back then and since. But he thinks boxing is also keeping him from a better life, both now and in the future.
“I feel as if I can get better. I could see it,” he said. I could see that I could become a better person, but it’s not there yet. The person I can become, I can see it, but this is holding me up from getting that.”
David Greisman, who has covered boxing since 2004, is on Twitter @FightingWords2 and @UnitedBoxingPod. He is the co-host of the United Boxing Podcast. David’s book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” is available on Amazon.
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