Kenny Bayless to work Mayweather-Berto fight

By Boxing News - 08/27/2015 - Comments

Image: Kenny Bayless to work Mayweather-Berto fightBy Allan Fox: Kenny Bayless will be working as the referee for the September 12th fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Andre Berto at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. For Bayless, this will be the 7th time that he’s worked one of Mayweather’s fights during his long 19-year pro career.

With this fight being such a one-sided fight in terms of boxing skills, it really doesn’t matter who the referee is. This isn’t a fight where Mayweather has to be concerned about who the referee is working the fight because he’s got all the advantages against the 31-year-old Berto.

In the past some boxing fans have had issues with Bayless because they felt that he didn’t do enough to police some of the things that Mayweather does in the ring clinching and the use of his forearms. But in looking at the fights where other referees have worked Mayweather’s fights, it doesn’t seem to matter. He fights the same way whether Bayless is working the fight or someone else.

The judges assigned to the Mayweather-Berto fight are as follows: Adalaide Byrd, Dave Moretti, and Steve Weisfeld.

“Berto can fight. He’s a two-time champion. He’s hungry. He comes to wage a war. There is never a dull moment when he fights so I expect a hell of a fight out of him. We’ll all see how it plays out,” Mayweather said.

There’s no doubt that Berto will be looking to turn the fight into a war from the first round on. That’s how he normally fights, and he knows full well that he has to turn the fight into a brawl for him to be able to compete in this fight. Berto obviously wants a second shot at Mayweather and the only way he’s going to be able to convince Mayweather to fight him a second time is if he can somehow defeat him or make it close enough to where Berto can claim he was robbed like Marcos Maidana did after his first fight with Mayweather.

We’ve heard Mayweather say over and over again that this will be his last fight of his career, but there’s little chance that that he’ll walk away from the fight off of a loss or controversial win. Mayweather has too much of an ego to let his career end in a less than positive outcome. That means we’re going to see Berto fighting as hard as possible in this fight, and hoping that he can somehow earn a second payday.

“My last fight, all you guys put [Manny] Pacquiao on a pedestal and look what happened. I went in there and did what I needed to do, which is win,” Mayweather said.

We don’t know how the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight would have wound up if Pacquiao hadn’t made the mistake of going in there with a bad shoulder injury. The story is that Pacquiao had the injury for a long time before the Mayweather fight, but we don’t know what the reality is.

It’s possible Pacquiao could have had the injury for a long time, but it’s also possible that he experienced the injury during training camp and then went and took the fight with Mayweather anyway. It would have been nice to see how the fight between Mayweather and Pacquiao would have ended up if Pacquiao came into it reasonably healthy, but we’ll never know.



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