Gervonta Davis remains the WBA lightweight champion, but only by the skin of his teeth.
On Saturday night, at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, Tank Davis put his title on the line against Lamont Roach. Though he was a massive favorite, Davis very nearly lost his title, managing to scrape out a majority decision draw after 12 hard rounds.
However, Davis is lucky he even managed the draw because he could easily have lost the fight. In the ninth round, after taking a punch from Roach, Davis inexplicably dropped to a knee. He then ran over to his corner with his coaches wiping his face with a towel. Davis explained exactly what happened in his post-fight interview.
“I just got my hair done two days ago, and she put grease in my shit,” Davis explained. “The shit was like, you know when you’re sweating and things like that and the grease came in my face and it burnt my eyes.”
The crowd did not take kindly to Davis’s explanation, booing him heartily, which led Tank to defend himself.
“Damn, why are y’all booing like I’m saying bullshit?” Davis said. “This is real facts. Come on, man! Look at my hair [takes off his hat], I just got my shit done.”
Another fact is that Davis took a knee in the middle of a fight, which almost always results in a knockdown being awarded. For whatever reason, referee Steve Willis, who actually started counting for the knockdown, ultimately decided not to penalize Davis.
“I didn’t want to get caught while my eyes were burning,” Davis said at the post-fight press conference. “You can get knocked out like that. I’d rather take a knee you know, but I didn’t know you could get disqualified for all that. When he started counting, I was like what the hell, but it’s cool.”
The scorecards ended with one judge giving it 115-113 for Davis and two judges had it 114-114, which led to the majority draw. If the referee did score it as a knockdown, Roach would have handed Davis the first loss of his career due to the automatic point deduction.
“Honestly, I thought I should have won without that being counted a knockdown,” Roach said about the incident at the post-fight press conference. “I’m not the ref, you know what I’m saying, if he had to wipe sweat out of his eye he had to wipe sweat out of his eye. The rules do state if you take a knee it’s an automatic 8-count. If that was counted a knockdown, I would have won a majority decision.”
