Kyrone Davis is not at the top of the list that any middleweight wants to fight.
Is he high risk? Yes. Is the reward low if you beat him? Yes.
No one seems to understand that more than the fighter himself.
Even after the best victory of his career, taking the undefeated scalp of touted Elijah Garcia, he’s been unable to capitalise, spending a year on the sidelines.
And when he returns on Saturday, he faces an unbeaten Cuban with a 100 per cent knockout ratio.
In an era of prima donnas and those who often explore paths of least resistance, Davis would not have it any other way.
The lack of activity is merely a minor frustration – “a little bit, but it is what it is” – but to come back against 7-0 (7 KOs) Yoenli Hernandez is just fine with the 30-year-old.
“I didn’t want a gimme, though,” he tells BoxingScene.
“We could have got a gimme. We could have got something easy just to keep myself active. “I wanted the fight that was going to push me closer to where I was going.”
As such, heavy-handed Hernandez is rated No. 1 by the WBA, No. 4 by the WBC, and No. 7 with the WBO. Davis is 14, 11, and 7 with the WBA, WBC, and WBO respectively.
Janibek Alimkhanuly holds two of the four major belts, while Carlos Adames and Erislandy Lara own one each.
The middleweight division has come under fire in recent times for a lack of star power.
“They’re the champions. I mean, they’re the champions for a reason. I don’t rate them low,” Davis explains.
“I think everybody at this level is really good. I want to get in the ring with them.”
Who does he think is the best out of the current crop?
“Sort of styles make fights,” he continues.
“So the best can be… it can go in and out. I think that Lara is going a little bit on the older side and smaller than all the rest of them. I think Adames has more defensive flaws than probably Lara. I think Janibek is probably the most well-rounded, but he gets lazy. I think that there’s different things you can do to all of them. I would like to fight all of them.”
But, ultimately, he admits of the 160lbs division: “It’s a little quiet.
“The champions seem like they don’t want to fight, so I think that makes it a little bit more quiet. I think that Lara fought once and fought Danny Garcia, who was in the middleweight [division], and that was kind of like a weird-looking fight.
“And then you got Janibek. He’s fighting guys and he’s not sure if he wants to go to 168 or stay at 160, so he’s kind of like playing with the division. Adames got a good win over Sheeraz [scored a draw], but he hasn’t fought much, so I think activity has something to do with that. But it always changes. It goes up and down. You get a new star that’s born, or somebody comes up out of a division and they move up, and you get some fiery stuff that happens. Boxing is like a flow. Sometimes the 147 division is hot. Sometimes 154. One-fifty-four is hot right now; one hundred and sixty-eight was super-hot. And now it seems like the light heavyweights are increasing in popularity.
“I mean, for that long stretch of heavyweight fights, that was just terrible. Then we got a really good few years, so it happens. It’s boxing.”
Davis’ easy-going demeanour extends to his own career. Sure, he beat Elijah Garcia, and deserved to in June 2024, but the fight was not close even though one judge scored the majority of rounds for the young unbeaten star. Davis claims to have taken that in his stride, but his coach, Stephen Edwards, did not manage to. Edwards was irate.
“Me as a boxer, and me always coming in on that side, it’s not something that you can kind of worry about,” Davis laments. “It’s going to be what it’s going to be. You already have so much pressure from just wanting to do your best all the time. You can’t think about the judges. You got to think about the job that’s in front of you, and then at the end, you know, we’ll see what happens. But I have no control. If you can’t control it, then why worry?”
Edwards also has no control over the judges, but that did not stop him from addressing the situation.
“Well, ‘Bread’ is not the fighter. His job is different than mine,” Davis explains.
“What he does is different. I don’t try to be him. He don’t try to be me.”
In that respect, they both know where they stand with one another.
Davis made his debut in 2014, and Edwards was with him then. Through the subsequent 11 years, and with Davis now 19-3-1 (6 KOs) having faced the likes of David Benavidez, Garcia, Patrick Day, and Anthony Dirrell, they have developed a bond and boxing telepathy which means often words are not needed for the coach to get his message across.
As Davis made his way through the amateurs, he watched Julian Williams’ progress. They knew one another, and with Davis doing well in the amateurs, he went to spar the Philadelphian star, who was being trained by Edwards. Even before Davis turned pro, they decided to work together.
“[He was] very vocal, he understood, not just boxing, but how boxing relates to life, and I think that resonates with me,” Davis says. “So from learning different things and being more technical and being more efficient, it definitely impressed me with how he did things, the way he trains. I was really impressed by all of that, and I think that’s what made me decide that, ‘Hey, I think this guy would be good for my future and good for my career.’”
Davis has been training alongside Caleb Plant ahead of the Hernandez fight. Plant, also trained by Edwards, boxes on the same bill on Saturday, May 31, in Las Vegas, against Jose Resendiz.
As always for Davis, the stakes are high. Victory, and he will be within touching distance of the title fight he’s coveted, and one that might have looked unlikely when he suffered an early-career setback – in 2016 – at the Sands Bethlehem Event Center, losing a decision to Junior Castillo in an eight-rounder.
“I definitely made some mistakes in the fight. I felt that I won the fight,” he recalls.
“My coach thought I won the fight, but it was a learning experience. I was a lot younger, and there was some weird stuff going on behind the scenes that, with experience, I would have been able to see and change and give myself a better advantage. But, I mean, it’s a learning experience. I don’t even think about that.”
A decade on, and boxing on a Gervonta Davis bill in Las Vegas, Davis delivered against Garcia with a tactically mature and astute performance. He and Edwards had done their homework, and executed with aplomb in the MGM Grand Arena.
“I’m super pleased with how it went,” Davis says. “Obviously, I was able to do what I wanted to do. The game plan… we actually had a couple game plans. The first game plan was to back him up and use the ring, but back him up in spots. You’re actually the first person I ever told that to, but that was the initial game plan.
“But when I started to see how easy it was to line him up [with the right hand], I looked at Bread, and we have like a way we can talk without talking, and I started landing that little right-hand shot that we work on, on the bag, and he [Bread]’s like, ‘If that’s not broken, work it.’ So I was angling off, throwing a right-hand, stepping in, using my defense and using my reach advantage. Even though he was a little taller than me, I had a reach advantage on him, and I started noticing that he didn’t understand distance.
“So those are the adjustments that I was making as the fight was going on. Once I got his timing down, the right hand wasn’t missing. We took that all into the bank.”
Davis has been able to bank plenty sitting under the Edwards learning tree. His coach is a boxing historian, raised in one of the sport’s famous fight cities, Philadelphia. But despite visiting the City of Brotherly Love on business many times – and having a Philly coach – Davis does not anoint himself as a Philly fighter. He was born in Monmouth County, New Jersey, and lives in Wilmington, Delaware.
“I’m from Delaware, I’m not a Philly fighter,” he smiles, before adding, “I’m a historian myself, so I love boxing. I love the history of boxing. My coach is a historian of boxing. He sends me all types of different fights for me to watch. I like watching the old fights. I like watching the new fights as well. So I have a vast understanding of the Philly boxing scene and things, the history. And since I trained in Philadelphia, I see a lot of the history. I know a lot of the guys, so it’s cool to see.
“I love the atmosphere, I love the way that we spar, I love the way that we work, I love the way that we do things. [But] I won’t consider myself a Philly fighter coming from Delaware. “I’m like adopted. When I fought in the amateurs, I was from Delaware, and I fought on a Philly team because Delaware didn’t have a team. So I was on the Philadelphia boxing team because I beat everybody from Philly. So I’m like Philly-adjacent.”
Now, however, Davis is hoping to make up for lost time. Hernandez is a difficult assignment, and it is not the first time he has had to shed rust on the job. Kyrone went almost two years without a fight after losing to Benavidez. He didn’t walk away. He didn’t quit. He kept working and waited for a date.
Asked what was going on, he said: “I don’t really have an answer. I was in the gym… I mean, it’s hard to get fights sometimes. I fought a super middleweight against a guy that was the scariest guy, I guess, and I fought him short notice. And the way that I performed, I guess, scared some middleweights. It was hard for us to get a fight, lock somebody in, a very high-risk-over-reward kind of a situation.
“We wasn’t able to really get any of the bigger fights that we wanted, so we had to take some tune-ups, kind of like beat somebody. But it’s frustrating. I get turned down a lot because of the high-risk-low-reward type of fight.
“‘What is that going to do for us?’ Or, like, ‘That’s too much right now.’ Like, ‘We want this.’ “So it’s a little frustrating with that. I think I’m starting to get to a place where it’s starting to equal out. The fights are starting to mean more, even though I’m a high-risk, you beat me because of my name, like the fight I’m in now. Like, this is a good win for Hernandez if he can get it.
“He probably wants somebody like me on his resume. So we’re able to get somebody like him in the ring where he’s ranked super high in the WBA for whatever reason, and we’re able to get the fight to happen. It was an easy fight to make.”
Nothing has come easy for Davis, but he will hope the risky chore of defeating the unbeaten Cuban Hernandez will reward him with the title opportunity he craves.
Tris Dixon covered his first amateur boxing fight in 1996. The former editor of Boxing News, he has written for a number of international publications and newspapers, including GQ and Men’s Health, and is a board member for the Ringside Charitable Trust and the Ring of Brotherhood. He has been a broadcaster for TNT Sports and hosts the popular “Boxing Life Stories” podcast. Dixon is a British Boxing Hall of Famer, an International Boxing Hall of Fame elector, is on The Ring ratings panel and is the author of five boxing books, including “Damage: The Untold Story of Brain Trauma in Boxing” (shortlisted for the William Hill Sportsbook of the Year), “Warrior: A Champion’s Search for His Identity” (shortlisted for the Sunday Times International Sportsbook of the Year) and “The Road to Nowhere: A Journey Through Boxing’s Wastelands.” You can reach him @trisdixon on X and Instagram.