Teofimo Lopez, the WBO light welterweight champion, understands why Gervonta ‘Tank’ Davis chose not to appear at his grand arrivals yesterday in Las Vegas for his fight this Saturday night against Frank Martin.
Lopez feels that WBA ‘regular’ lightweight champion Tank (29-00, 27 KOs) took the wrong approach to get even with his promoters for not doing a great job of pushing the promotion for the contest to turn it into a blockbuster.
The Limitations of Promotion
Tank, 29, doesn’t understand that even if his promoters had poured more time, money, and effort into hyping his title defense against Frank Martin (18-0, 12 KOs), the boxing public would still not be massively interested in it.
The season for that is Martin isn’t a big name, lacks charisma, and is not someone the fans wanted Tank Davis to fight. There isn’t a promotional company that can artificially create interest in a contest if the fans don’t view it as appealing.
If Tank’s promoters believed his fight with Martin was big enough to invest in marketing, they wouldn’t have added fighters David Benavidez, Gary Antuanne Russell, and Carlos Adames to the undercard. They obviously included them on the card because they understood that Martin wasn’t a fight that the boxing public was excited to see Tank fight.
For Tank to get more interest in his fights, he’s got to focus on facing these fighters:
– Shakur Stevenson
– Ryan Garcia
– Devin Haney
– William Zepeda
– Vasily Lomachenko
– Teofimo Lopez
– Naoya Inoue
– Jaron ‘Boots’ Ennis
Davis has got to take risks with his career to get fans interested in seeing his fights in big numbers, and he can’t expect his management to create excitement for his matches if he’s going to face lackluster opposition.
The Importance of Professionalism
“Tank not showing up [for the grand arrivals] is probably because of the poor promotion that he has expressed,” said Teofimo Lopez to the Sean Zittel YouTube channel, talking about Gervonta ‘Tank’ Davis failing to show up at the grand arrivals yesterday to promote his fight against Frank Martin on Saturday.
“He said the poor promotion has been pushed onto that fight. A lot of people don’t realize they’re fighting this weekend, which is kind of like, ‘Whoa,’ but once people start figuring it out, I think that’s Tank showing his understanding of promo and basically getting back at them.
“Sometimes, it’s not good to go about it like that. There are certain ways. There were many times I didn’t want to go into my fighter’s meetings with ESPN just because of certain people I disagreed with about my style or my recent fights. However, it’s a job and an obligation for us, and we’ve got to show that.
“Tank didn’t just not go and not do anything. You obviously see a video of him working out while not showing up,” said Teofimo.
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