Berto made a mistake of trying the Mayweather shoulder roll against Guerrero

By Allan Fox: Andre Berto made a tremendous mistake last Saturday night in his loss to WBC interim welterweight champion Robert Guerrero by trying to use Floyd Mayweather Jr’s shoulder roll defense for the entire fight. It didn’t work at all, and Berto just looked silly in getting badly beaten for 12 rounds by Guerrero and ending up with two badly swelled up eyes that were in danger of closing.

For a fighter as advanced in his career as Berto you don’t want to be be changing your fighting style dramatically at this point. For a top world contender you don’t make huge changes like the one that Berto made in adopting Mayweather’s shoulder roll and using it for an entire fight. That kind of thing you want to either start early in your career or try it out for a short period of time in a fight to see if it works.

It wasn’t working for Berto last night, as punches were just sailing over his lowered shoulder and hitting him smack in the head. There are two fighters, besides Mayweather, that know how to use the shoulder roll and that’s Adrien Broner and Richard Abril. Those are the only guys I’ve seen that know how to use it properly, and it really works for them. It wasn’t working for Berto, as he just looked like he was tiring left arm out by holding it upwards.

He would have been better off keeping his arm up the way he used to fight. He was so much easier to hit tonight than he usually is, and I think that goes back to his mistake of trying to use the shoulder roll technique without really knowing how to use it against a world class opponent.

Berto obviously used it in training camp against sparring partners that weren’t on the same level as Guerrero. If he tried to use that against somebody good they would have showed him that he doesn’t know how to use it, and he wouldn’t have wasted his time trying it out against Guerrero. I still think Berto would have lost the fight, because he seemed to have major stamina problems that kept him from fighting hard enough to beat Guerrero, but I still think he would have been much better off had he not chose to use the Mayweather shoulder roll style of fighting.