Davis to defend WBA title tonight on Showtime

Baltimore fighter puts championship belt on line against journeyman Ruiz

Baltimore-born Gervonta Davis will make his first defense of the WBA super featherweight title to night against heavypunching Hugo Ruiz, a late replacement for Abner Mares.

Davis (20-0 with 19 knockouts) will headline the fight card from Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson, Calif., to be broadcast on Showtime starting at 10 p.m.

Coming off a 10-month layoff since he won the title with a third-round knockout of Jesus Cuellar, Davis had looked forward to a showcase matchup with Mares, a former world champion in three different weight classes. But Mares pulled out last week, first blaming an elbow injury and then acknowledging he’d undergone surgery for a detached retina.

Promoters scrambled to find a replacement and settled on Ruiz (39-4 with 33 knockouts), a former WBC super bantamweight champion who’d just won his last fight on Jan. 19. Though Ruiz will move up in weight to fight Davis, he holds height, reach and experience advantages over the champion.

Davis, who didn’t make weight before his last fight, struggled again Friday to reach weight for the fight. He eventually made the weight on his third attempt at a weigh-in Friday night.

Ruiz has promised an all-action fight. “Out of my 39 wins, 33 of them are knockouts so I can say with confidence that I can knock out Gervonta Davis,” he told reporters in California on Wednesday. “No fighter is invincible and that’s a really possible outcome on Saturday.”

Davis wrote on Twitter that Ruiz’s aggressive talk angered him and had him looking for a knockout of his own.

“I was just watching Hugo Ruiz as I came in here,” he said Wednesday. “All I know is that he is fast, he has some speed. It looked like he has some power and good timing. I actually think that this is not a walk in the park, like people think.”