Kelly Davis

Kelly Davis is a combat sports coach who has won titles in boxing, kickboxing, MMA and bare knuckle, and he started in gyms because his mother put him there.

Cason Banyas had been running fighter after fighter through Salty's Fight Talk, and after one of those episodes he decided he wanted the man standing in the corner instead. Davis came into the McBastard Studio and started further back than the question asked for. Before any of the titles, he said, there was his mother, the seventeenth of his grandmother's eighteen children, who raced cars, drove eighteen wheelers, preached on Sundays, and had him boxing in Reno at about eight years old.

Davis teaches range and distance first, and he will not hand a fighter somebody else's style. He built his method by watching the trainers who were beating him in Las Vegas gyms. Thell Torrance's men jabbed him apart, so he learned the jab. A body puncher broke him up, so he learned the body. Doc Broadus, then 98 and once George Foreman's trainer, showed him a way to do push ups and told him nobody ever listened to him. Davis listened. He wrote his brother's style down on paper, Monday through Saturday, took him up the mountains outside Vegas and sparred nobody for three months. He starts with a man's mentality, because the truth about a fighter comes out the moment he is in the ring.

His own fighting ended in a front headlock. In his first MMA bout he was eating knees from a man around six foot five, clipped him, got hold of his head and pulled back with everything he had. The popping he could hear was his own shoulder. He tore every ligament in it, and after that the joint came out around a dozen times, so he learned to reset it against the ropes and keep fighting. He took a bout in Fresno anyway, put the man down with one left hook to the body, then stood there with his shoulder sitting in his armpit while the referee waved it off. In Las Vegas he worked a disposal company from four in the morning until noon to beat the heat, paid Roger Mayweather to train his brother, and stood at the back of the room learning for nothing.

The coaching started in 1999, the day he heard grown men in that gym laughing at his brother in the ring. His brother went on to win a world title three times over, giving up half a foot and more to men he was knocking out. Davis tells his fighters the ugly parts too, including the ones who fell out of the game, and he has spent about three years building a fantasy fighting platform that cuts the fighters in on the money. When a father asks him to train his daughters, he sends over a resume a mile long first.