Smile, they say, and the world smiles with you, and the same is true when a boxer promotes their upcoming fight with a shrug. Do that and we all shrug in return. We wonder, as they do, why we should even bother. We question, as they do, how far we have fallen and how far there is still to fall.
The good thing about Gervonta Davis, boxing’s top shrugger, is that the distance is not too great. At five feet five, he is closer to the ground than most – precisely why Jake Paul, a cruiserweight, will “fight” Davis in November – and he is also someone accustomed to defiling his name with out-of-ring misdemeanours. The idea of a fall from grace, then, is less worrisome for Davis than it perhaps should and would be for men who stand a little taller and carry themselves with a bit more decorum.
With Davis, he is content to be what he is nowadays. He is a WBA lightweight champion whenever he feels motivated to properly compete and he is, for the time being, the next opponent for Jake Paul, an influencer whose foray into boxing is either good or bad depending on your view of the sport and what it should represent. In Paul’s company, Davis feels small in every conceivable way. He feels small by virtue of him being six inches shorter than Paul and he feels small because he has, by agreeing to box Paul on Netflix, become a punchline in a little-and-large comedy routine. Gone, alas, is the “Tank” Davis who knocked out Leo Santa Cruz with that ferocious uppercut in 2020. Gone, too, is the young man many tipped as the fighter to replace Floyd Mayweather as the “face of American boxing” shortly after Davis turned pro in 2013.
Now, in place of that version, we have a small man resigned to making himself smaller. We have a man whose first encounter with Jake Paul had him standing side on with the expression and demeanour of a teenager who had just been caught masturbating by his dog. It wasn’t guilt we saw on Davis’ face and in his body that day. It was something closer to shame. Either that or boredom.
Regardless of why he looked the way he did, it was hardly how a promoter expects a fighter to sell a fight. Even Jake Paul, his opponent, someone whose business is overselling, seemed slightly irked by Davis’ reluctance to cooperate during their press conference. At one stage he called the world champion “boring”, as if it had suddenly now dawned on him that he had selected the wrong short guy with whom to sell his David-versus-Goliath slop.
Yet, the truth is, Davis, rather than incapable, was just being honest. Never a great talker even on a good day, Davis clearly knows what he has signed up for by “fighting” Paul and knows that in the context of the “fight” all that really matters are two things: one, his reputation as a professional world champion, and two, his size, or lack thereof. Everything else, in his view, is irrelevant and, frankly, beneath him. All he wants is the money Jake Paul can promise and a minimal amount of engagement with someone for whom he has only contempt.
It’s not just Paul, either. These days Davis has contempt for the entire industry and the very profession from which he makes a living. This has been the case for some time, it would appear, and if Davis is to be believed this fight against Paul will be his last – one final cash-grab before he is gone for good.
“This shit is trash,” he said before his last fight, against Lamont Roach, in March. “It’s garbage. I don’t care about belts. I don’t care about that stuff.” Later, in the same press run, he explained: “I want to do therapy. I will lose the fire I have inside me. I want everything out of me so I don’t ever think about fighting again. I don’t even [want to] think about getting angry. I have two girls, two daughters.”
For all his faults, spectacular and manifold, there remains something almost endearing about Davis’ honesty and his ability to capture the general feeling of the populace without meaning to. In speaking about boxing the way he has of late, he not only demonstrates a rare transparency but dares to question the long-held and somewhat trite belief that boxing, as a pastime, only helps and enriches.
For most that is true, of course; the sport helps more than it hurts. Yet there are some instances in which a fighter is damaged by their obsession with violence, and their selfishness, and the isolation, and the need for attention and validation, all of which are either prerequisites or by-products of their sport. Davis, it would seem, is one such case. He can see the danger of outstaying his welcome and knows that just as some men and women are made good by boxing, it is just as true that some are made bad. Moreover, Davis knows the greater, inconvenient truth in all this. He knows that even the best people in boxing – the good guys – are still only people who inflict pain on others for money as the rest of us stand around and watch.
Asked if he was now the face of his sport, Davis recently said: “I’m not the face of boxing. I’m just somebody that boxes.” He may, though, be the voice. The voice we need, if not want. The voice that speaks the truth. The voice of a generation.
Even if it prefers to mumble and grunt, and even if much of what he says is uninspiring, unintelligible, or downright rude, there can be no doubting the honesty of that voice, nor the way it captures the sentiments of those still willing to use their voice to speak openly and without fear.
At most press conferences these days, we encounter and endure the opposite of the Davis approach. Often we listen to hysterical, high-pitched voices tell us things even the people saying them do not believe and we realise that every word said has been approved by the man whose hand is up the marionette’s arse. In fact, based purely on what we hear, it would appear that to just function and thrive in boxing today one must agree to either be compliant – that is, dishonest – or undergo something akin to a lobotomy.
Now and again you might get someone who speaks their mind and whose words resonate, but such moments are few and far between and rarely ever spontaneous or pure. When, for example, Chris Eubank Jnr decided to cosplay as an activist and take shots at various promoters in a press conference earlier this year, he then undermined his so-called courage by genuflecting at the feet of Turki Alalshikh and describing the Saudi financier as the “only promoter I know for sure isn’t a scumbag”. It was, again, although sold as a brave act, merely a performance from Eubank Jnr. He was bending the knee, as all of them do, but ensuring he dragged a few of his enemies down into the dirt in the process.
Davis, on the other hand, is a bit different. His vibe is less about showy monologues and more about showing you the deflation he feels to be alive and competing at this confused point in boxing’s lifespan. One look at his glum, WTF face and you know that this is not what Davis signed up for when he started out. He wanted to be a world-famous boxer, not a content creator. He thought and hoped he would be able to make his money and legacy the old-fashioned way. There would be titles and super-fights, he thought, and he would find fame and fortune as a result of being good at his job. Instead, Davis has found only infamy – entirely his fault – and has now, at the age of 30, been reduced even further in size for the purposes of selling a spectacle fight with a court jester who knows nothing else. He has degraded himself for a sport that rewards degradation and in fact encourages it and, like so many, has decided that if you can’t beat them, you must join them. You must get in line. You must sell a piece of yourself. You must smile through the pain.
He knows it’s nothing to smile about, despite all the money on offer, and that is maybe the point. The point is, being the face of boxing in 2025 does not mean what Gervonta Davis thinks it means, nor what it used to mean, nor what he once hoped it would mean, hence: “I’m not the face of boxing.” But in the end, whether Davis likes it or not, he is the face of boxing. He is the face of boxing simply because no face in boxing depicts what it means to be involved in boxing in 2025 more accurately than his.
