Rain falls in thin, needling lines over Hell’s Kitchen as Devin Haney walks into the Victory Boxing Gym. Somewhere along Ninth Avenue an ambulance threads through the congestion, its siren drawn out into a long, mournful ribbon that slips past the gym’s walls. He nods to a few familiar faces, peels off a Supreme Vanson leather jacket and begins to unwrap himself from the city. His father, Bill, arrives a step behind him, not so much entering the room as taking possession of it.
“The youngest undisputed champion!” Bill cries out, half to the gym, half to himself. “He’s done it on three continents! Twenty-six years old and still writing history! Let the sparks fly!”
The energy in the room seems to tilt toward the Haney clan, as it always does. Devin keeps his head down after taking a seat on the ring apron, winding the gauze around his knuckles with the same slow, practiced patience he’s carried since boyhood. Bill continues barking, rights and resentments and triumphs spilling out in a proud, protective crescendo. It’s a familiar ritual for the Haneys, father and son moving in concert. Bill has been here from the start, a self-styled Richard Williams of the hurt business: promoter, strategist, architect and hype man rolled into one. He has been shaping this trajectory since Devin was a boy, arranging professional fights in Tijuana when American commissions said he was too young. Lately, it’s a relentless leverage of social media to breathlessly tout his son’s achievements. “Everything we built came from a plan,” he says. “We believed in the plan before anyone else did.”
The first time I saw Haney up close he was 17 years old, newly licensed by special exemption from the Nevada commission after building a 4–0 start in Mexico and fighting in a four-rounder on the Manny Pacquiao–Timothy Bradley III undercard before a sea of empty seats in Las Vegas. His hand speed was already blinding, the eyes calm and alert, the movements unusually assured for a teenager still growing into his limbs. Nine years later, that stillness has only hardened. He glides around the ring working the pads with former world champion Mickey Bey, the mitts cracking like distant gunshots. Bey murmurs faint instructions between flurries. Haney grins, plants his feet and fires again.
On Saturday night in Riyadh, Haney will move up to challenge the undefeated Brian Norman Jr for his WBO welterweight title. The fight is still three weeks away when we catch up at an open workout in Manhattan. “I feel great: strong, sharp, happy.” A small smile tucks into the corner of his mouth. “At 135, I was fighting the scale more than the guy in front of me. I’d make weight, and feel drained. Now I can eat. I can train for skills, not survival.”
Two years ago, Haney seemed on an unstoppable rise. After defending the WBC lightweight title four times, he flew to Melbourne to outpoint George Kambosos Jr and unify all four belts at 135lb. He went back again seven months later to beat him more conclusively. Then came a career-defining win over Vasiliy Lomachenko in a fight that demanded uncommon nerve and ring intellect. After seeing off Regis Prograis for a 140lb belt, Haney was 31-0, a two-weight champion and a fixture in the pound-for-pound conversation, all by the age of 25.
But in one night, everything changed.
The Ryan Garcia fight was almost entirely overshadowed by Garcia’s erratic behavior both in person and online. Weeks of unravelling – or performative unravelling – unsettled everything around the promotion. Then Garcia weighed in at 143.2lbs, a yawning 3.2lbs above the division limit, costing him money and the chance to win Haney’s title, but giving him a clear physical advantage. Still, the Haneys went through with the bout.
Nothing prepared the sport for the night itself in April 2024, when the Haneys’ master plan was left in tatters by boxing’s biggest chaos agent. Haney was knocked down three times, all from the same left hook, and declared a majority-decision loser after 12 shocking rounds. The result was later overturned to a no contest after Garcia failed a drug test for ostarine, a performance-enhancing drug that promotes muscle growth. But the visuals of Haney getting battered to the floor repeatedly are much harder to wipe from the public consciousness, much less his own.
In the aftermath the Haneys filed a lawsuit against Garcia alleging fraud and battery, which only redoubled the ridicule from boxing’s unsparing chattering class, a complaint that has since been withdrawn. But even that, he admits, never sat right. “That wasn’t me,” he says. “That was the business side. I’m a fighter. I want to get it back in blood. I never wanted to do it that way. But I had people around me saying, ‘You lost millions, you’ve got to hold him accountable.’ I get that. But the truth is, I just want to fight. That’s who I am.”
The rematch that might have rewritten the narrative never materialized. Haney had already signed his part of the contract, but Garcia lost to Rolly Romero before it could be finalized on the Saudi-backed card that took over Times Square. “We had a fight signed,” he says. “He didn’t want the rematch. But I still want it back in blood. I want to right that wrong.”
On that same card, Haney’s return against José Ramírez signaled that something had been shaken. Haney won comfortably, but he mostly pirouetting around the perimeter, jabbed sparingly, flinched at feints and landed only 70 punches across 12 rounds. Surely there were mitigating factors: a 13-month layoff, the strain of staying at 140lb, the emotional debris of the Garcia nightmare. But the shift was noticeable.
Haney doesn’t bother engaging with the criticism. “They’re going to say something regardless,” he says. “If you can punch, they’ll say it’s all you do. If you’ve got speed, they’ll say it’s because you can’t punch. All I want is to keep beating the guys they put in front of me.”
Which is why Saturday night in Riyadh matters. Standing across from him will be Norman, unbeaten at 28-0 with 22 knockouts, and the owner of one of the most violent left hooks thrown this year: the punch that flattened Jin Sasaki in June and announced his arrival. A win would make Haney a world champion in a third division. A loss would represent a far more complicated detour.
If Garcia embodied chaos, Norman represents danger. A younger, heavier fighter entering the ring with the kind of confidence Haney once carried. The fight came together very quickly, but Haney says the choice was deliberate. “I want to fight the best available guys,” he says. “I went down the list. Ryan lost and didn’t want it. So what better guy than the best one right now at 147?”
Haney respects Norman’s potential but not the mystique. “He’s good,” he says. “But it’s hard to say how good. They put him in with guys who made him look the way they wanted him to look. We’ll see what happens when he’s in there with somebody who can think.”
There is relief, too, in the move upward. “I’m much happier,” he says. “My mental [state] is better. I can focus more on game-planning instead of losing weight. At 135, everything in camp was about the scale. Now I finally feel like I’m training to fight again.”
He’s become his own dealmaker, too, negotiating directly with promoters, including Turki al-Sheikh. “I’ve been negotiating my own deals for a while,” he says. “I love what Riyadh Season is doing for boxing. The best fighters are fighting the best fighters. Everybody’s making money. It’s a good time to be a boxer.”
What keeps him moving forward, after belts and criticism and business? The answer lands softly but with certainty. “We set a goal as a kid,” he says. “I want my name to be mentioned with the greats when it’s all said and done. I won’t stop until I get there.
“They said I couldn’t punch. They said I couldn’t take a punch. But I got up. I’m still here.”
