How can we expect Gervonta Davis to change when boxing never will?

G ervonta Davis, the World Boxing Association’s lightweight champion and one of America’s most prodigiously gifted young athletes, is the type of homegrown talent with a rags-to-riches backstory, crowd-pleasing style and unvarnished authenticity that makes US television executives water at the mouth.

The west Baltimore native came up the hard way through abject poverty, foster care and group homes, learned to box under the trainer who inspired the character of Dennis ‘Cutty’ Wise in The Wire and became the sport’s second-youngest world champion at just 22 years old. Since then, he’s moved the needle like few other US prizefighters in recent memory, capturing versions of world titles across three different weight classes and selling out arenas from coast to coast. A southpaw endowed with concussive power in both hands and a granite chin, Davis is unbeaten in 29 professional outings with 27 knockouts, his status as a crossover attraction only climbing with each successive fight. When his sixth-round TKO of Rolando Romero broke the live gate record at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center last year, Madonna watched from ringside.

So far Davis’s shimmering brilliance inside the ropes has been enough to relegate a disturbing pattern of allegations – that he is a violent, unrepentant domestic abuser – to the margins of his narrative. But that bubble of impunity was finally punctured last month when he pleaded guilty in a Baltimore circuit court to four counts stemming from a hit-and-run crash in November 2020 which left four people hospitalized, including a pregnant woman. After the judge overseeing the case rejected a plea deal that would have allowed him to serve 60 days of unsupervised home detention, Davis faces the real prospect