By Dan Ambrose: 31-year-old Andre Berto (30-3, 23 KOs) may have temporarily resurrected his boxing career with a 6th round knockout last Friday night on Spike TV in his victory over Josesito Lopez (33-7, 19 KOs) at the Citizens Business Bank Arena, in Ontario, California, USA.
With the victory, Berto captured the interim WBA World welterweight title, and put himself in position to get a world title shot at WBA 147 pound champion Keith Thurman this year.
This is a fight that their adviser Al Haymon will likely not hesitate long to make, because it would be an in house fight that would potentially help both of them.
The win has Berto and a lot of boxing fans thinking that he’s turned his career around. I’m not one of them. I don’t see the win as having accomplished anything other than Berto proving that he could beat a guy that was stomped by Marcos Maidana and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9UX0-WiMFo
For Berto to actually prove something, he’s going to need to show that he can beat a 1st tier fighter, not a 2nd tier guy, which is what Lopez is. He’s not a top 15 ranked fighter. He’s a tune-up type guy. It’s good that Berto beat him, but let’s not get it twisted and think that Berto actually accomplished something. He didn’t. He won’t prove anything until he faces a much, much better fighter than Lopez and beats him.
As good as Berto’s win was, he still has pretty much no chance at all of getting a fight against WBA Super World welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr this year or ever. For Berto to get a chance at fighting Mayweather, he’ll need to beat Thurman and likely one or two other top guys like Amir Khan and Danny Garcia.
With the way that Berto looked last night, I think his chances of beating Thurman are absolutely zero. I don’t give Berto any chance at all of beating Thurman. Berto struggled last night for the first four rounds against the 2nd tier Lopez, and that kind of shows you where Berto is at this point in his career.
For him to have any chance of beating Thurman, Khan or Danny Garcia, he would have had to make easy work of Lopez, and that’s not what happened. Berto was losing the fight at the time of the stoppage. It’s good that he got the victory, but the fight showed pretty clearly where Berto is in terms of what he has left in the tank.
Berto knocked Lopez down twice in the 6th round, and got the stoppage victory when referee Raul Cantu Jr abruptly halted the fight at 1:03 of the round after Berto had knocked Lopez down with a right hand to the head. The stoppage was premature, as Lopez was still okay enough to continue fighting.
I don’t think he would have won the fight, but he should have been given the chance. Lopez looked like he would have been finished off in that round if Cantu Jr had let it play out a little longer, but he took that chance away Lopez by halting it.
The boxing fans are the ones that really got robbed by the quick stoppage, because they didn’t get a chance to see the fight play out to the logical finish. With Berto, he’s never a sure thing, because he’s had guys down before in the past, and still ended up losing the fight to them. He gasses out quickly when trying to go for knockouts, and he tends to stay tired.
Comments are closed.