Kery Davis: From Boxing and Boardrooms to Bison and the Wrong Kind of Blowouts

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The two real seats of influence in the United States are separated by 228 miles of a heavily traveled stretch of interstate highway along the East Coast corridor. New York City -- specifically midtown Manhattan -- is expensively paneled boardrooms, highly paid executives in $2,000 suits, big business done behind closed doors, and the ramifications of all that wheeling and dealing as manifested in carefully planned advertising campaigns and on four-story-high billboards in Times Square. Washington, D.C., has its paneled boardrooms, too, with power brokers of a different sort also involved in high-level negotiations out of the public eye. It’s called politics, and the ramifications usually, but not always, are played out on the evening news and editorial pages.

As the director of programming and business affairs at HBO Sports, and then as senior vice president, Kery Davis lived in the tumultuous bubble of the former for 17 years. He was significantly involved in making some of the biggest and richest fights in boxing history, a litany of high-profile events featuring such certifiable superstars as Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Lennox Lewis, Floyd Mayweather, Roy Jones Jr., Oscar De La Hoya, Manny Pacquiao and Bernard Hopkins, among others. If HBO was, as it claimed, “the heartbeat of boxing,” until 2012 Davis was there monitoring the pulse rate.

But the former Dartmouth College point guard, who stresses that he was not forced out at HBO, nonetheless had his seat at the table vacated in the sort of intermittent struggle for control that always results in someone emerging as the winner and someone else the loser. Davis, who had been instrumental in signing Mayweather to a long-term HBO contract and in bringing Pacquiao to the premium-cable giant, was seen by some as disposable after Mayweather, in a monumental defection, bolted to Showtime. It also probably didn’t help Davis’ cause that he was a close friend of Richard Schaefer, then the Golden Boy Promotions CEO, whose fighters had allegedly been barred from appearing on HBO by Ken Hershman, successor to the forced-out Ross Greenburg as president of HBO Sports. Davis followed Greenburg out the door 16 months after Hershman, who formerly ran the boxing operation at Showtime, took Greenburg’s seat in the big corner office.

Whether his departure from HBO was or was not strictly voluntary, Davis, 57, has now resettled into a new decision-making position in Washington, but not as an elected official, lobbyist or consultant to those making national policy. Last week, he began work as the athletic director at Howard University, widely considered the most academically prestigious of America’s historically black colleges and universities. It seems a natural fit for the Ivy League-educated Davis, who received his law degree from Cornell, but also one that poses certain transitional challenges.

Where Davis’ boxing duties had him dealing almost exclusively with superstars who were accustomed to performing on brightly lit international stages, and for multimillion-dollar purses, he now must find ways to make Howard -- where the athletic budget is very limited and on-field success even more scarce at present -- competitive in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, which is nobody’s idea, from a strictly sports perspective, of the SEC or Big Ten.

If you’re looking for a numerical comparison that illustrates the enormity of the task confronting Davis, consider this: former HBO client Mayweather reiterated on Saturday night that he was retiring from the ring after another ridiculously easy points nod, over 18-to-1 underdog Andre Berto; earlier that day, the Howard Bison were obliterated, 76-0, at Boston College, a rout so one-sided that BC coach Steve Addazio and Howard counterpart Gary Harrell consented to play 10-minute quarters in the second half after the Eagles went to the locker room up 62-zip. Were it not for the shortened quarters, and had Addazio been inclined to see how big a score his team could have run up, it is quite likely the Bison would have lost by triple digits.

Oh, and in its season opener a week earlier, Howard had been crushed, 49-0, by Appalachian State. Apparently the journey from 49-0 (Mayweather) to 0-49 (Howard’s margin of defeat vs. Appalachian State) is much shorter than those 228 miles between New York and D.C.

But there is great satisfaction in building something from the ground up, and Davis -- who had been approached while at HBO about an AD position at another predominately black university -- believes the time and place are perfect for him to enter this new and challenging phase of a most interesting life. He said his business acumen and passion for sports make him uniquely qualified to eventually elevate Howard’s athletic department to a point where it won’t feel like a poor relation to the academic side.

“The athletic director’s role in today’s world has a significant business function,” Davis noted. “There’s fund-raising involved, administrative duties, managing people, negotiation of contracts. Those are the kind of things I’m very comfortable with doing. They’re the kind of things my experience at HBO prepared me for.

“Coming into this position, you need two things. One is a passion for sports -- and I don’t think there’s a bigger sports fan than me -- and a love for and willingness to work with young people. I didn’t have that much opportunity to do that at HBO, but I sit on a number of boards that deal with young people. At this time, I felt it was right and proper to try to make an impact on young people’s lives, and also to serve an institution that provided a platform for many of those individuals that came here before me to receive a quality education. I view this as a tremendous opportunity for me, and I’m looking forward to the challenge.”

Davis said he has no illusions that the challenge, at least in football, can be whittled down to manageable proportions quickly or easily.

“We want to excel on the field, but excelling at Howard on the field is going to be different than excelling at some other institutions,” he said. “At Howard, academics come first, which is why I think my Ivy League experience really helps me in that regard. Yes, we want to win on the field, and we want to win in the classroom. We want our student-athletes to win in life after they graduate.

“But we are a long way away from being competitive with a team like Boston College. We play in a conference where we think we can be competitive even this year. Our goal is to one day compete with the BC’s and Notre Dames, but that’s a very difficult thing to achieve in one or two years on the football field. You can do it a lot quicker in some other sports.”

You certainly can do it more quickly in boxing, where a presumed nobody can instantly become a “somebody.” It happened on Feb. 11, 1990, when a 42-to-1 longshot named Buster Douglas knocked out seemingly invincible heavyweight champion Mike Tyson in the 10th round in Tokyo.

Although HBO televised that bout, the biggest upset in boxing history, it was before Davis’ arrival. Still, Davis was there for many memorable fight nights that made an indelible impression.

“I would be remiss if I said I didn’t miss boxing,” he said. “There is nothing in sports quite like the electricity of a big fight night when the two principals are making their way to the ring. We were instrumental in identifying and furthering the careers of some of the greatest fighters in the world. It’s something I am and always will be proud to have been a part of.”

Bernard Fernandez, a five-term president of the Boxing Writers Association of America, received the Nat Fleischer Award from the BWAA in April 1999 for lifetime achievement and was inducted into the Pennsylvania Boxing Hall of Fame in 2005, as well as the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame in 2013. The New Orleans-born sports writer has worked in the industry since 1969 and pens a weekly column on the Sweet Science for Sherdog.com.