By Allan Fox: Andre Berto (30-3, 23 KOs) realizes that Floyd Mayweather Jr. (48-0, 26 KOs) has the talent and hand speed advantage in their fight this Saturday night, but he believes that his punching power will be the great equalizer in this fight.
Berto intends on taking the fight to Mayweather and turning the fight into a war that he’s ill equipped for when the two of them battle it out at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Mayweather hasn’t faced a big puncher with the kind of hand speed that Berto has.
Mayweather has faced big punchers in the past like Marcos Maidana and Miguel Cotto, but those guys didn’t have Berto’s hand speed. The combination of speed and power is going to make Berto a very formidable adversary on Saturday.
“He has a great IQ, but one shot can change it all,” Berto said. “You can be smart, you can be fast, but this is boxing.”
It’s true that Berto could change the whole framework of this fight if he can land one of his big bombs. Some of the shots that Berto landed in his last defeat to Jesus Soto Karass in 2013 were big enough punches to stop someone like Mayweather. You have to give Soto Karass a lot of credit in being able to take some of Berto’s biggest punches to come on and score a stoppage in the 12th.
Mayweather would have had a lot of trouble taking the kind of shots that we saw Soto Karass taking, and that was with Berto fighting with only one arm. He tore up his right shoulder in the 2nd round and fought the last 10 rounds using just his left hand.
Berto is going to be coming into the Mayweather fight with just a plan A, and that’s to try and score a knockout. He obviously knows that his chances of out-boxing Mayweather are extremely poor, so I doubt that we’re going to see Berto revert to plan B if things don’t work out well for him in the early going.
Berto will need to stick with his original plan of trying for a knockout no matter how bad things are going for him. But it’s also a positive for Berto to have just one plan because he won’t need to start shifting through different plans in a desperate manner if his first plan fails to work. Berto will obviously stick with the original idea of shooting for a knockout until the bitter end.
“Floyd is sharp of course, but I have certain tools that I believe will make it a real difficult Saturday night. We’re going for the knockout. You definitely don’t want to miss it,” Berto said.
Berto has a good left hook, uppercut and right hand. His jab isn’t that much of a weapon, so I don’t expect him to be using that too much in the fight. Berto has to look to hit Mayweather with everything he’s got with each shot and hope he can stun him the way Shane Mosley did in their fight in 2010. If Berto can land one of his big upper cuts, he could hurt Mayweather and put him in a bad way.
Comments are closed.