In the long term, product quality wins out. But in the short term, especially at time of launch, perfect branding and marketing are what matter most, product quality be damned.

It is with this in mind that I once again celebrate my former podcast partner, now a fellow BoxingScene contributor, Kieran Mulvaney, for his brilliant branding early this decade of Gervonta “Tank” Davis, Teofimo Lopez, Devin Haney and Ryan Garcia as the “Four Princes.” 

It was a play on the well-known “Four Kings” label affixed to Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns, but this quartet was a collection of mere princes because they were still so young, they fought a couple of weight classes below where the Four Kings rivalry fights took place, and they hadn’t yet fully seized boxing’s most exalted of thrones – they merely seemed poised to.

Again, magnificent marketing. A simple tagline the whole boxing world could attach to. But about that product quality…

Look, none of these four fighters is a bust. Not even close. Three of the four have spent time on pound-for-pound lists, two of them have held lineal championships, and all of them have collected seven-figure paydays.

But at the same time, Davis’ controversial draw against Lamont Roach Jnr on Saturday night made it so that each of the Four Princes now has a blemish on his BoxRec.

Lopez’s “0” was first to go, via a massive upset against George Kambosos Jnr in November 2021 – and the mercurial character and boxer in Teofimo has also escaped with two debatable decision wins among his five fights since.

Garcia was stopped by Davis in April 2023 in the first Prince vs. Prince duel; no shame there. But his second meeting with a fellow Prince, against Haney last April, ended in maximum shame, with failed drugs tests turning a temporary victory for “KingRy” into a no-contest with fines and a one-year suspension attached.

Technically, Haney’s record is still spotless, but there’s at least an implied blemish when you see he has 31 wins in 32 fights. The asterisk comes in the form of that no-contest against Garcia, which for a short while sat on his record as a defeat, and which could easily have been his second loss if not for some friendly judging at the end of his 2023 match against Vasiliy Lomachenko.

And then there’s Tank, who was cruising along at 30-0 with 28 KOs, largely free of in-ring controversy (his 2021 decision win over Isaac “Pitbull” Cruz was close, but generally viewed as fair) until Roach got his hands on him. Judge Eric Marlinski scored Saturday night’s bout in Brooklyn 115-113 for Davis. Judges Steve Weisfeld and Glenn Feldman both had it 114-114. Anecdotally, the majority sharing their scores on social media felt Davis was lucky to get a draw. 

And even those who were fine with tallying six rounds apiece acknowledged that referee Steve Willis altered the outcome by failing to rule a knockdown when Davis took a knee in the ninth round and was effectively granted a timeout. 

Less than a month after the publication of my “Ref’d up” column, Willis ref’d up big-time and enabled Tank to escape with a draw instead of a loss. (The scores, if all three judges had given Roach a 10-8 ninth round, as usually happens when the ref calls a knockdown, would have been 115-112 and 114-113 twice, all for Roach.)

The timing of this stumble by the last Prince standing was particularly notable in that it came one day after the announcement that the other three Princes will all feature on a May 2 fight card in Times Square – with a press tour kicking off in New York this Tuesday.

So all four Princes are in the news right now. And each of the four – even Davis, the one I thought was relatively untouchable – has me rethinking whether he’ll go down as one of the actual kings of the era in the 135-pound range.

In part, that’s because there’s a lot of competition for that status. 

Not long after Mulvaney branded this bunch, Shakur Stevenson started earning “Fifth Prince” consideration. Keyshawn Davis has looked sensational of late and now has people thinking he could go down as the best Davis of his generation. Lomachenko comes from a slightly different generation but has fared admirably against the Princes despite the official results. Then there are other developing forces in Richardson Hitchins, Arnold Barboza Jnr, and the man who dazzled against Jose Valenzuela in the Tank-Roach co-feature: Gary Antuanne Russell.

The quartet Mulvaney designated about four years ago as the Four Princes may prove not to be the Leonard, Duran, Hagler and Hearns of their time. They may instead be recalled, when all is said and done, as the Wilfred Benitez, Iran Barkley, John Mugabi and Pipino Cuevas of the era.

By the way, I left out one name that should not be left out when speculating about who will ultimately be remembered among the elite of this lightweight/junior welterweight era: Roach.

My major takeaway from Davis-Roach was not that Tank had been “exposed” as some kind of fraud or had turned in a lousy performance; it was that Roach fought masterfully and had just the right talent level and game plan to give Davis fits.

That’s not to say Tank doesn’t deserve criticism for his performance. As many people have pointed out, his tendency to start slow and to be excessively economical with his punches caught up to him (or nearly caught up to him, depending on how you view him getting a draw on his record). 

And his behavior in the ninth round – thinking he could call timeout by taking a knee, thinking it was within the rules for him to ask his cornermen to towel grease from his eyes, basically him assuming A-side treatment from Willis and getting it – deserves endless criticism.

But Roach deserves credit more than Davis deserves criticism. He took on an elite counterpuncher and out-counterpunched him, answering nearly every Davis left hook with a right hand. He didn’t bite on Tank’s traps and feints and patiently waited and set some traps of his own. When he traded punches, he did so just long enough to let Davis know he meant business and then got out of there and stopped exchanging. 

And he must have a tremendous chin, because while his defense, anticipation and counterpunching limited the number of clean shots he took, he still got cracked on the jaw a few times and emerged to hear scores read – something Tank’s opponents aren’t supposed to do.

Davis was a -1600 betting favorite when the fight began. There were plenty of folks in boxing ripping this as a pointless mismatch, but there were also sharper students of the game touting Roach as a challenger who would likely be competitive. Still, I didn’t see anyone picking “The Reaper” to take a scythe to Tank’s perfect record.

The outcome is something of a lesson that superstars should take the biggest fights they can when they can because sometimes that “marking time” bout is the one that bites you.

Still, any damage to Davis’ reputation can be quickly undone. All he needs to do is sign for an immediate rematch with Roach and get the win next time.

At the post-fight press conference, Davis was teasing an unspecified bigger fight that he said would come first. Some speculated maybe that was Tank against Stevenson. For argument’s sake, let’s say that’s precisely what Team Davis has in mind. Well, unfortunately, that fight just lost a lot of its luster. 

With a fight like Tank vs. Shakur, one that would be billed as potentially determining who is the best American boxer younger than 30, you can’t have one of them coming directly off a fight most people think he deserved to lose as a -1600 favorite. Davis needs the Roach rematch – even though winning it won’t be easy – to re-maximize interest in fights against Stevenson and other Four Princes-level opponents.

The sight of a draw on Davis’ record is not a massive hit to his marketability. But the feeling that he was second best in his most recent fight is. So he needs to replace that with another, more recent fight in which he is not second best. 

Davis-Roach II needs to happen, and it needs to happen next, and it ought to happen in a location where Davis’ Baltimore fans and Roach’s D.C. fans can combine to create the most dynamic possible atmosphere (and where New York’s Willis – usually a fine ref, by the way – will not be on the commission’s short list).

With Davis’ record now reading 30-0-1, to go with Lopez’s 21-1, Garcia’s 24-1 with one no-contest, and Haney’s 31-0 with one no-contest, all of the Four Princes have all been knocked down a peg or two since the peak of our enthusiasm for them. And it didn’t take a wild round-robin of Prince-on-Prince matchups to get there. There have been just two fights between them. The Four Kings, by comparison, created nine fights together.

It was always perhaps a bit unfair to mention these four modern fighters in the same breath as Leonard, Duran, Hagler and Hearns. Maybe they didn’t all have the goods to merit being labeled “princes.” Or at least, to borrow from another HBO franchise even more violent than the network’s boxing programming, they aren’t quite the princes who were promised.

The Four Princes, unfortunately, are flawed princes. Branding can be perfect. Fighters, as we are routinely reminded, cannot be. 

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.