The Gervonta Davis miracle and how Tank can define an age

Gervonta “Tank” Davis is the boxing kid without a childhood.

Last Saturday, at the Barclays Centre in Brooklyn, he knocked out another challenger and moved his career stats to: world champion at two weights, unbeaten in 27 with 25 fights finishing long before the final bell. He might also be the unofficial best fighter in the sport. Tank Davis is now 27.

In the ring at the weekend was Rolando Romero, who was unbeaten and fearless and eventually saved from his own lost senses in round six after he was dropped cleanly.

Romero was up on one of the scorecards. It was the fourth defence by Davis of his WBA lightweight title, which is one of the sport’s golden divisions.

In life away from the brutality and safety of boxing, Davis is the product of an empty system; he is a child of social services, damaged and made vicious by all he saw and witnessed growing up in Baltimore. He was the youngest of three boys and at five they were taken from their mother; his father was in prison. The boys bounced from care disaster to care disaster until a grandma recovered her lost flock after three years. It is a battle so many lose.

The salvation of the family would be enough of a tale, but then the little boy without the smile found the gym - it was a special gym, a gym placed at the very heart of The Wire, the seminal television show that put Baltimore on the map.

In the Wire, the gym is run by Dennis Cutty Wilson, fresh from a prison sentence; Cutty saves the most damned of souls in a city at war over drugs. The gym is a blood-stained and tainted refuge. In the real world, which is equally bloody, little Tank found Calvin Ford in the gym. Ford had served ten years. It’s just life imitating life - there is no art involved. Ford lost his