By Jason Kim: HBO will be televising former WBC welterweight champion Andre Berto’s fight this Saturday night against little known IBF welterweight champion Jan Zaveck (31-1, 18 kO’s) at the Beau Resort & Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Berto, 27, will be getting a chance to recapture one of the welterweight titles after losing his World Boxing Council strap in his last fight against Victor Ortiz last April. It’s interesting that HBO is still willing to show Berto’s fight despite him not being a champion anymore, but then again HBO has spent a lot of time and money on displaying Berto’s fights for the past three years.

Incredibly, Berto has failed to catch on with the boxing public in the United States even with HBO faithfully showing his fights over and over again. If anything, Berto seemed to become less popular with boxing fans with every fight instead of more popular.

A reason for that is his tendency to fight smaller guys from divisions below him and less than dangerous fighters from the welterweight division. You could say that Berto wasted a great deal of the past three years while holding down the WBC belt by taking safe fights. It kept him a champion up until April, but left him without a career defining fight. Now Berto gets another chance against Zaveck.

Berto can’t afford to blow it, because a loss here will likely keep him off HBO fights in the future. He needs to prove that the Ortiz loss was a fluke thing. Berto supposedly had an anemia problem, which kept him from being able to fight hard for the full 12 rounds against Ortiz without tiring out. If Berto fades against Zaveck, then you’ll have to see the anemia theory as just an excuse.