It’s on: Gervonta Davis vs. Ryan Garcia on April 22 in Las Vegas

Image: It's on: Gervonta Davis vs. Ryan Garcia on April 22 in Las Vegas
By Boxing News - 02/24/2023 - Comments

By Chris Williams: Showtime boss Stephen Espinoza announced moments ago that the mega-fight between Gervonta ‘Tank’ Davis and Ryan Garcia is now “official” for April 22nd in a 136-lb catchweight in Las Vegas, Nevada.

This should be a fun fight for as long as it lasts, and it’ll be a massive step up in class for the Golden Boy promoted Ryan Garcia, who up until this point has faced only one halfway decent opponent during his seven-year professional career in 34-year-old Luke Campbell.

Tank Davis announced the fight on Twitter moments ago, sounding ecstatic about finally getting the chance to fight Ryan after four years of back & fourth talk.

There’s no word yet on how much boxing fans will be asked to pay to watch the fight on PPV, but hopefully, it’s not the astronomical $100 per household cost that we saw with Floyd Mayweather Jr’s disappointing fights against Conor McGregor and Manny Pacquiao.

Not only were those fights big disappointments, but the undercards looked like they were thrown together by the promoters without care, choosing to do it on the cheap by setting up mismatches from top to bottom in woefully bad fights.

Now, we can only hope that Ryan (23-0, 19 KOs) and Tank (28-0, 26 KOs) don’t suffer an injury or illness that results in the fight needing to be postponed. Assuming that neither comes down with a physical ailment, this fight will finally take place, and hopefully, it’s a competitive match-up.

YouTube video

If you’re Tank Davis, you got to be really happy because going to make massive money against a fighter that would likely lose to five or six other fighters in the 135-lb division. It’s easy money for the 28-year-old Davis and likely the last gimme before he’s pressured to fight Shakur Stevenson in a fight that he’ll likely lose.

It’s interesting how much interest there is in the Davis vs. Garcia fight despite the fact that the 24-year-old Ryan is totally unproven as a fighter. A big reason for the popularity of Ryan is that he’s a hybrid fighter.

In other words, he’s a mix of a boxer/influencer, so he’s got 9 million Instagram followers on his social media site that will want to see the fight, even though most of them are likely not boxing fans, but rather people that are into Ryan for whatever reason.

Tank hasn’t cut his teeth yet on the best opposition at 130, 135, or 140 during his professional career. We don’t know how good he is because he’d been matched carefully by his promoter promoters at Mayweather Promotions, who kept him away from fighters like Shakur Stevenson, Vasily Lomachenko [when he was younger], Regis Prograis, Frank Martin, and Teofimo Lopez.