Gervonta Davis vs. Lamont Roach Jr.: Live Winners and Losers, Results

Lyle FitzsimmonsMar 1, 2025

It was another step toward superstardom for Gervonta Davis.

Or it was supposed to be anyway.

The Baltimore-based "Tank" had won belts of varying worth at three weights by the time he turned 30 last fall and he started his 2025 run with a second defense of the WBA's strap at 135 pounds against rising 130-pound champ Lamont Roach Jr.

The match was set to take place in Houston last winter but went off instead at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, where Davis and Roach topped a four-fight Prime Video pay-per-view card that included a title defense for Jose Valenzuela at 140 pounds.

A three-fight prelim show featuring former 154-pound champ Jarrett Hurd got started at 6 p.m. and the B/R combat team is in place to take in all the action and deliver a definitive, real-time list of the show's winners and losers.

Take a look at what we came up with and drop a thought in the app comments.

Loser: Drawing a Conclusion

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The scorecards didn’t match the optics.

Though he walked out with his WBA belt still slung over his shoulder, it was reigning champion Davis humbly suggesting that a rematch was in order after a razor-thin decision yielded a split-decision draw with Roach after 12 tense, tactical and chatty rounds.

“Hopefully we can run it back, for sure,” Davis said. “Lamont’s a great fighter. He’s got skills.”

The conciliatory approach was the opposite of the fight’s contentious run-up, during which the rivals from Baltimore and Washington, D.C. promised menace. Instead, it was a war of strategic wills in which both men tried to force the other from comfort zones, and it was Roach surprising many with his ability to survive the power that had felled 28 of Davis’ 30 past foes.

In fact, it was Davis who seemed more impacted by his opponent’s punches, which allowed Roach to rally down the stretch to earn 114-114 verdicts on two of three scorecards that overruled the one tally of 115-113 in the champion’s favor.

The B/R card went the other way, giving Roach seven of 12 rounds for a 115-113 edge.

“I’m a little disappointed in the decision, I thought I pulled it out,” Roach said. “I definitely thought I won. We can run it back. It’s a win for me in my book but we’re not satisfied with that, we need a real W.”

He’d have had it already had a controversial moment been handled differently.

Roach threw a flicking jab early in the ninth round that only grazed Davis’ face, but the champion took a step back, turned and voluntarily went to a knee near his corner before leaning through the ropes to allow a team member to towel off his head.

Referee Steve Willis chastised Davis for the maneuver but didn’t start a count and didn’t call it a knockdown, which kept the judges from possibly scoring a two-point round in Roach’s favor.

Davis said after the fight that grease from a recent hair styling got into his eyes, and, though disappointed, Roach didn’t press the issue beyond simply suggesting it could have been considered a knockdown and thereby a decisive scoring round.

“If that’s a knockdown,” he said matter of factly, “I win the fight.”

But Randy Gordon, a former chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission who oversaw the hiring of officials while in that position, suggested Willis had made a significant and fight-deciding error.

“Absolutely,” he told Bleacher Report. “If a guy takes a knee, count. If he doesn't continue, he gets DQ'd. That was no draw.”

Winner: Flipping the Script

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Al Bello/Getty Images

It’s an old boxing adage, but it’s consistently proven true:

Styles make fights.

Valenzuela and opponent Gary Antuanne Russell arrived in Brooklyn for Saturday’s 140-pound co-main coming off diametrically opposite mid-2024 results, in which Russell suffered his first loss to a long-armed and awkward Alberto Puello last June while Valenzuela had a career-best performance in schooling a crudely aggressive Isaac Cruz in August.

Based on that, the blueprint might have been for Valenzuela to use movement and athleticism to control distance and workrate against a powerful foe with 17 KOs in 17 wins.

Didn’t happen.

Instead, it was the methodical but highly-skilled Russell in charge by every measure, using speed, footwork and heavy hands to bust up the Mexican-born champion’s face and snatch his newly-won belt by unanimous decision in which he won 34 of a possible 36 rounds.

B/R’s card had it 10-2 in his favor as well.

“Yeah, you can call that a virtuoso performance by Mr. Russell,” blow-by-blow man Mauro Ranallo said.

Russell was busier and more accurate than his opponent, throwing 957 punches to Valenzuela’s 443 and landing 252 to his opponent’s 127.

“This is just a small steppingstone,” he said. “I’m coming for the rest of the belts. On to the next.”

Winner: Exceeding Expectations

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You’d not have guessed it going in.

Given that they’d delivered KOs in less than 40 percent of their combined wins, it didn’t seem Puello and Sandor Martin would provide much beyond a tactical and stylistic nightmare for one another when they met for Puello’s WBC title belt at 140 pounds.

Someone, though, forgot to tell the combatants.

Though their matchup was by no means Gatti-Ward in nature, the Dominican champion and his Spanish challenger did spend much of their time engaged in close quarters, exchanging hard body shots and snappy shots to the head across 12 surprisingly violent rounds.

The southpaws combined to throw 967 punches and land 312 across 36 minutes, which ended with Martin–in the first title fight of a career that began in 2011–dropping a frustrating decision in which Don Trella’s 8-4 lean toward Puello broke the deadlock created by 7-5 cards in opposite directions from judges Mark Consentino (Martin) and David Sutherland (Puello).

Loser: Revving the Engines

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Ahead of the WBC lightweight title fight between Gervonta Davis and Lamont Roach

Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images

Card-building is clearly an inexact science.

Though Yoenis Tellez is a prized prospect and Julian Williams is a former world champion, the two of them put together didn’t yield a particularly fan-friendly PPV opener.

Instead, the matchup of world-ranked commodities at 154 pounds–Tellez is the WBA’s No. 2 contender and Williams is No. 10–was precisely the sort of tedious, overly strategic snoozer that’d prompt a customer who’d not laid out $79.99 to change the channel.

It’s not a good sign when the announce team is leaning hard on the fighters’ “poise and patience” rather than violence and aggression, and it was a struggle for Ranallo, Abner Mares and Brian Campbell to maintain their own interest, let alone anyone else’s.

They recalled Tellez’s harrowing journey from Cuba to trainer Ronnie Shields in Texas. They heralded Williams’ rebound from poverty as a child to purchasing a home for his mother. They entertained one another with their vocabularies, using exotic words like “buoyed.”

What they couldn’t do, however, was prompt either man into sustained action beyond an occasional back-and-forth flare-up–the best of which came in the final seconds of Round 9.

In the end, Tellez averaged 15 landed punches per round to his opponent’s nine and earned a predictable unanimous decision by scores of 118-110, 117-111 and 119-109.

Loser: Keeping it Going

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At 34, Hurd needed a measuring stick.

The former 154-pound champion, a winner just once in his last four fights, looked at rugged Venezuelan middleweight Johan Gonzalez to indicate whether he still had the stuff to compete at a world-class level.

In fact, Hurd suggested during fight week that anything short of dominance against the sturdy but limited foe would indicate that it was time to walk away after 13 years in the ring.

Now, after 10 desultory rounds, the question has been answered.

Though taller, longer and more athletic than his 33-year-old opponent, Hurd was consistently outhustled and out-landed, repeatedly taking volleys of telegraphed, clubbing shots and replying with only intermittently bad intentions on the way to a split-decision loss.

Afterward, he made it official.

“I’m a man of my word,” a weary Hurd said, sporting an ugly knot over his left eye. “This will be the last time y’all see me. I had a wonderful career.”

One judge gave Hurd a 96-94 scorecard edge but was overruled by another 96-94 tally the other way and a decisive 98-92 nod in Gonzalez’s favor. B/R agreed with the masses, too, giving Gonzalez six of 10 rounds.

“I think (retirement is) a great idea, to tell you the truth,” analyst and Hall of Fame trainer Joe Goossen said. “He looked nothing like the Jarrett Hurd of the past.

“The reflexes weren’t there. He was getting hit with heavy right hands. That was a very rough fight for him. He doesn’t have it anymore. He had to prove it to himself whether he had it or not, and he doesn’t.”

Winner: Impressing the Experts

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Miguel MEDINA / AFP

Deric Davis arrived at Barclays Center having won five fights against foes with a combined 7-20-0 record, which meant he was clearly due for a step up in class.

So, while Jamal Johnson is no one’s idea of a world-beater, he hadn’t lost as a pro and presented something more than crash-test dummy opposition.

But you’d have never known it.

A 22-year-old lightweight from Washington, D.C., Davis made the most of his prelim star turn with a dominant performance that yielded two knockdowns before referee Ricky Gonzalez rescued Johnson at 1:56 of the first round.

And the guys who know what they’re looking at were impressed.

“He was quick. He was powerful. He was efficient,” Campbell said. “Circle his name on the bout sheet.”

The end was already near when a hard left hand wobbled Johnson and prompted him to turn his back on Davis, who leapt in with a right hand that dropped his stricken opponent to his knees.

Johnson rose and re-engaged but was soon dropped again with a left hook, and, after rising unsteadily and stumbling as Gonzalez looked in, the wave-off became inevitable.

“(Davis is) gonna be a champ one day,” Goossen said. “He’s got all the qualities for that to happen.”