By Tim Fletcher: In a sign that Floyd Mayweather Jr. made a huge blunder of colossal proportions in selecting Andre Berto as his next opponent, tickets are still available for their fight this Saturday at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. As of Tuesday, there are still 2,100 unsold tickets for the fight, according to ESPN.com.

This is unheard of for a Mayweather fight, as he’s someone who frequently has seen his fights sell almost immediately once his fights are announced. But in the case of his bout against Berto, the interest has been cool from the boxing public. They simply aren’t interested in paying to see this mismatch.

Additionally, the fans aren’t excited about paying $75 to see Mayweather face Berto on Showtime pay-per-view. If you look at the boxing forums in the internet, fans are saying that they have no interest in paying to see Mayweather fight a guy with a 3-3 record in his last six fights in Berto.

There may be more than 2,100 unsold tickets. The promoters have tickets as well, and it’s unclear how many tickets that are still out there unsold. What would be really interesting to see is if the tickets wind up being given away to fans around the MGM Casino on September 12th in order to fill the Arena completely.

The reasons why the tickets aren’t being sold is likely more just Mayweather picking out an opponent that fans don’t see as a quality fighter. Another reason is the timing of this mismatch. It’s coming right after Mayweather’s poor fight against Manny Pacquiao on May 2nd of this year.

Boxing fans thought that was a real rip off; especially with the way the tickets and PPV prices were hiked to the limit with sky high prices for a fight that turned out to be horrible. Fans were asked to pay $99 to see the fight on PPV. Instead of the price for the fight being dropped, the prices were raised for the PPV. It looked to some like the fans were bilked and given a bad product. Mayweather ran around the ring avoiding Pacquiao much of the fight. Pacquiao made things worse by admitting afterwards that he had a shoulder injury that he came into the fight with.

The lower prices for the Mayweather-Berto tickets still haven’t enticed a lot of fans to purchase them. It also hasn’t helped that they’ve added a good undercard for the fight. They didn’t do that last time for the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight. That had a very poor undercard, even though there was plenty of money to pay top fighters to fight on the card.

There was no effort made in adding good undercard fights. I suppose the rationale for that was because they already had fans willing to purchase the fight due to the main event, so why bother putting a good undercard with it. The problem with that is that without a good undercard, it put pressure on the main event to be exceptionally good to make up for what fans didn’t get to see on the undercard.

When the boxing fans saw horrible fights on the undercard and the main event, the fans ended up very unhappy. Now instead of Mayweather making it up to the fans by fighting a really good opponent like Gennady Golovkin, he’s picked a poor in Berto. That move comes across like Mayweather is going to shove Berto down the fans’ throats whether they like it or not.

The fans obviously aren’t going to let Mayweather do that a second time, so they’re choosing not to buy tickets for this fight. I wouldn’t be surprised if only a handful of boxing fans purchase it on pay-per-view.

Mayweather has been saying it is his last fight of his career. If it is his last fight, the fans don’t seem to care, and they’re not rushing out to purchase tickets because of it.
“This is 100 percent his last fight,” Mayweather Promotions CEO Leonard Ellerbe said to ESPN.com.

This is pretty sad if it’s really Mayweather’s last fight of his career, because he’s made himself look really bad by picking such a poor opponent. You just have to wonder whose idea was it for Mayweather to play his cards so poorly by selecting Berto.