Lamont Roach ‘100 percent’ confident his chin can take Gervonta Davis’ power

Lamont Roach Jnr asserted his confidence ahead of his March 1 meeting with Gervonta Davis and said he would fight with more belief than “Tank’s” previous opponents. 

Given Davis’ imposing power – he is 30-0 with 28 knockouts – and the fact that Roach is coming up from 130lbs to meet Davis at lightweight, the question heading into their fight is how Roach plans to avoid being knocked out, much less win.

“It’s all about confidence,” Roach said. “It’s all about what you set out to do. It’s about how hard you work. It’s about being able to know that you got what it takes to do what you about to do. And I think a lot of opponents that [Tank] been in there with lacked that. I think the only person that didn’t was probably Pitbull [Isaac Cruz], but skill-wise, he was limited.”

Davis’ detractors criticize his matchmaking, which they feel doesn’t live up to his talent. Roach is correct that Tank’s opponents almost always retreat from his power – Ryan Garcia, for example, began aggressively but threw his game plan out the window after Davis knocked him down heavily in the second round. And Cruz’s struggles to cope with Jose Valenzuela’s boxing validates Roach’s critique of Pitbull’s skills. 

The flip side is that Davis is just that good, and Roach will become another opponent who backs away from him and eventually gets knocked out. 

If Roach is at all afraid of that possibility, then he is doing an excellent job of hiding it. Asked whether he believed he had the chin to withstand Davis’ vaunted power for 12 rounds, Roach said: “Yeah, for sure. We gonna find out! But yeah, for sure, 100 percent. For a fact.”

As for why he will beat Davis, Roach said: 

“I’m a dog. I’ve got the skillset of a master class boxer. […] My mental is on 1000. I can’t be mentally broken, I can’t be physically broken. He gonna have to get me to beat me.”