Gervonta Davis has posted a DM from promoter Eddie Hearn today, saying he wanted to talk. It’s believed that Hearn wants to orchestrate a blockbuster fight between the unbeaten Devin Haney and Tank Davis (29-0, 27 KOs) next.
Hearn is facing the daunting task of getting a fight between Haney and the PBC-managed Gervonta Davis, considering that Devin has already thrown a roadblock into making it by refusing to entertain a catchweight & rehydration clause.
Haney’s stance on the weight stipulations could ultimately sink his chances of getting the fight he wants against Tank. Whether Devin’s refusal is a negotiating ploy or if he’s genuinely serious is difficult to know.
It would be massive if the Matchroom promoter Hearn could broker that deal to put the Tank vs. Haney fight together. Hearn had been talking about wanting Ryan Garcia to face Haney in his first defense of his WBC belt, but there hasn’t been any interest from him or his promoters at Golden Boy.
Tank-Haney would be a bigger prize for the silver-tongued Hearn if he could work his deal-making magic to put this fight together, working with Tank’s management at PBC.
Hearn would be failing Ryan Garcia if he couldn’t bag the Haney fight for him, but it seems evident that Golden Boy doesn’t fancy that fight.
Bill & Devin’s Haney’s goal
Devin and his dad, Bill Haney, hope to lure Gervonta up to light welterweight and then crush him with size. They need to convince the superstar Tank to come up to 140 to challenge him for the newly won WBC belt he captured last weekend against champ Regis Prograis.
However, the Haneys see things differently than Tank does because they mistakenly believe that he values the WBC 140-lb belt as a trophy/prize. Tank doesn’t care about the WBC belt. He just wants Haney’s scalp and perhaps to knock him off his high horse.
One gets the sense that Haney’s pompous, self-important attitude likely annoys Tank Davis just as much as it did Prograis, so he wants to knock him down a peg and put him in his place by giving him a whipping that he won’t soon forget.
Prograis failed to do this, but Tank might succeed if he can get him to agree to the weight stipulations. There’s no way on Earth that Tank will willingly agree to fight Haney without the catchweight & rehydration clause because he won’t want to be facing a super middleweight as big as David Benavidez on the night.
“For this fight, I was able to rehydrate and feel like my normal self,” said Devin Haney to Thaboxingvoice about his being able to rehydrate to 165 lbs for his fight against WBC 140-lb champion Regis Prograis on December 9th.
Gervonta Davis publicly posting his DMs with Eddie Hearn today after his deleted tweet about Al Haymon earlier… pic.twitter.com/dJvn7vCOCU
— Michael Benson (@MichaelBensonn) December 15, 2023
“I want to make the biggest fights happen. That’s a huge fight. It’s the biggest fight in boxing,” said Haney about wanting to face Tank Davis next. “We’re going to keep making the fight happen. If it doesn’t happen, then it can’t happen.
Haney won’t give up on Tank
“We’re going to do everything in our power to give the fans a big, massive, good competitive fight,” Devin continued about the Gervonta clash that he and his dad, Bill Haney, want.
Hearn will need to get Haney to give ground on his stubborn refusal of a catchweight & rehydration clause. Even with those things in place, Haney would likely still have a tremendous weight advantage on the night of the fight.
With the science involved in how to quickly add water back to a fighter’s system within a few hours, Haney could still likely rehydrate to the mid-160s, enjoying a comfortable 20+ lb weight advantage over Tank Davis.
If the scientific method is used, it takes a mere 20 minutes to add two gallons of water to a person’s system. That’s close to 17 lbs. It’s pretty much impossible to prevent a fighter from rehydrating fully, even with a rehydration clause in place, if they know what they’re doing and have the right person working for them who knows how to get the water back into their system.
The only way to prevent Haney from rapidly gaining water back into his system is for a secondary weigh-in to occur moments before he steps inside the ring.
In this era, rehydration clauses only work on fighters who don’t have a clever team behind them that knows how to circumvent those things. If the secondary weigh-in is on the morning of the fight, it won’t prevent Haney from rehydrating to 165 or 170 if he’s got a good science guy working with him.
“Kenny Ellis is over there, trying to match me against the people that he feels are respectable or whatever the case may be,” said Haney when told that Gervonta Davis’ coach, Kenny Ellis, wants him to go up to 147 and fight Boots.
“Kenny can easily match me against his man [Tank Davis], the guy he trains. Regis’ coach was doing that, too, matching me against Tank when I was fighting Regis. What is this?” said Haney.
Ellis isn’t the one who makes the decision for Gervonta. He’s got PBC & Mayweather Promotions that decide whether they want to take a fight, and it’s difficult to imagine them agreeing to let him face Devin if they feel he’s going to be fighting a rehydrated super middleweight.
“I knew if I stuck to the game plan, the fight would wind up like it did, one-sided. What I said I would do, I did. I said he would never be able to hit me with a left hand and that I was levels above him,’ said Haney.
