Gervonta Davis – Mario Barrio generated over 200,000 buys on Showtime

Gervonta Davis brought in over 200,000 buys for his Showtime PPV fight against Mario Barrios on June 26th at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta.

Mike Coppinger of ESPN is reporting the numbers, which are good for a fighter in the smaller weight classes but nowhere near what guys like Canelo Alvarez would be bringing in if he was still on pay-per-view.

Gervonta’s numbers are slightly higher than his fight with Leo Santa Cruz last October. Again, not great, but given that Gervonta was fighting a guy that few boxing fans had heard of before in WBA secondary 140-lb champion Barrios, they’re decent.

Mayweather Promotions picked Barrios out, but they didn’t do Tank any favors because few fans knew who the guy was.

That basically put the onus on Tank to singlehandedly bring in ALL the buys with no help from the little-known Barrios.  Their decision to match Tank against Barrios is a questionable one because it limits what he could do.

Is Gervonta a bigger PPV draw than Crawford?

The pay-per-view numbers were similar to the low numbers that Terence Crawford brought in for his fights against Amir Khan and Viktor Postol. If you’re going to say that Crawford isn’t a PPV draw, you kind of throw that same label at Gervonta.

Crawford drawing 150,000 buys for the Khan fight is awfully close to the 200,000 buys that Gervonta brought in for the Barrios clash. If Crawford fought Barrios on PPV, he’d likely do over 200,000 buys as well.

“Sources: The Gervonta Davis-Mario Barrios Showtime PPV generated in excess of 200,000 buys, outperforming Tank’s October PPV with Leo Santa Cruz. The final number will likely fall in the 210 to 215K range,” said Mike Coppinger on Twitter.

You can argue that Ryan Garcia and Teofimo Lopez are both capable of doing better PPV numbers than Tank Davis.

Their promoters haven’t shown the same willingness to throw them on PPV the way that Floyd Mayweather Jr has done with Tank Davis. Mayweather has thrown Tank out there in a kind of an ‘If we built it, they will come,’ type of manner.

Ellerbe says Tank will fight anybody

“Tank will fight anybody. It’s not about going down,” said Mayweather Promotions CEO Leonard Ellerbe to Fighthub.

“People campaign and fight the biggest fights possible because in my opinion, his opinion and Floyd’s opinion, he can beat each and every one of those guys out there. It’s just a matter of us making the fights,” said Ellerbe.

Obviously, Ellerbe is just blowing smoke by saying that Tank Davis will fight anybody.

His own promoter Floyd Mayweather Jr said after his fight with Barrios on June 26th that he will keep Tank fighting in-house guys with PBC and Mayweather Promotions.

Unless Mayweather changes his mind about keeping Gervonta trapped fighting mediocre opposition with his in-house fights, we won’t see him face Teofimo, Josh Taylor, Teofimo, Ryan Garcia, or Devin Haney. Those are just for starters. There’s a lot of other fighters that Tank will never get a chance to fight.

Gervonta was losing to Barrios

“I would have liked to have seen Barrios go the 12 rounds, but Tank has devasting power,” said former two-time WBC super middleweight champion David Benavidez to Little Giant Boxing. “Honestly, I would love to see him [Gervonta] fight Josh Taylor.

“I think Josh Taylor would be a great fight for him, and then unify the titles [at 140]. Whoever wins that would be the best at 140.

“Him, Ryan Garcia, Teofimo, those are all the great fights. I think one of the things that helped him was Mayweather telling him he was down on the scorecards,” Benavidez said about Mayweather going up to Gervonta in between the seventh and eighth rounds to let him know that he was in danger of losing to Barrios.

“I felt like he was down too. If they had given it to Barrios, I don’t know but I thought Tank was down. I felt like the activity of Barrios, he was down.

“Mentally, that probably did a lot, Floyd telling him, ‘You got to go out there and get the knockout.’ It was super close,” said Benavidez.

Tank definitely was losing to Barrios, and that isn’t reassuring, to say the least. If Tank can’t even beat a paper champion like Barrios without his promoter Mayweather giving him a ‘Just win one for the old Gipper’ speech in between rounds, that’s a bad sign.