Matchroom Announces Keyshawn Davis Debut On Canelo Card

One of the top. U.S. amateur fighters has decided to forgo the delayed Tokyo Summer Olympics later this year and will turn pro on the undercard of the Canelo Alvarez main event in Miami at the end of the month. Keyshawn Davis, a former Golden Gloves national champ in 2017 and the runner up for the USA at the World Championships in 2019, is one of the more exciting American prospects of the Olympic hopeful team.

Matchroom Boxing made the announcement through social media Monday afternoon,

???? ????? ✅ #CaneloYildirim

Amateur phenom @KeyshawnDavis8 makes his pro debut on Feb 27! ?

? @HardRockStadium, Miami Gardens, FL
? https://t.co/MZHzh3WErx pic.twitter.com/cupLNamewy

— Matchroom Boxing (@MatchroomBoxing) February 1, 2021

Davis is a 21 year old out of Norfolk, VA and was expected to contend for a medal in the 138 lb. division. And, he had put on social media shortly after the 2020 Tokyo Olympics were postponed back last Spring by the Coronavirus pandemic that he was  looking to get paid to fight.

Davis decided a few weeks later to hang in with the Tokyo games being moved to the Summer of 2021. He told Mike Coppinger of the Athletic at that time about the difficulty of waiting to turn pro for another year,

“I’m not going to even lie, I was thinking about the Olympics since I was 7 years old before I even started boxing,” Davis said. “I didn’t even know what I wanted to be in the Olympics for, I just wanted to do it. I honestly thought I would be in the Olympics for track.”

There’s a lot of people saying that I already fight with no headgear, why waste another year fighting with no headgear in the amateurs, risking getting cut and stuff like that? I already have big options of going pro and being more well off than I am now.”

Davis obviously listened more and more to the last paragraph of advice and couldn’t pass up the opportunity/money.

Part of that has to be motivated by the fact that the Tokyo Games are in jeopardy of being moved out of Japan and may be canceled, once and for all, due to the pandemic, travel concerns for athletes world wide, etc.

Back to Davis’ debut: it’s not clear if he will compete at Junior Welterweight (140 lb. limit) or move up to the Welterweight division for the beginning of his career. He will likely fight a four or six round fight in his first bout as a pro. Davis actually turns 22 on February 28th.

Canelo will headline fighting Turkey’s Avni Yildirim for the Unified 168 lb. WBC/WBA titles. He is then expected to fight again in early May against England’s Billy Joe Saunders. That would be his third fight in fewer than five months and the most active he will have been in over a decade of action.