Andre Berto wants top fighters in 2011
Andre Berto wants boxing’s big names.
The WBC welterweight champion, making a fifth defense of his title on November 27 against Freddy Hernandez, will be fighting to insure the upcoming year will be more productive and meaningful than the last.
Berto (26-0, 20 KOs) will be taking on Hernandez on the HBO tripleheader featuring Celestino Caballero (34-2, 23 KOs) and a lightweight title bout between Michael Katsidis (27-2, 22 KOs) and Juan Manuel Marquez (51-5, 37 KOs).
He is aware that he’ll have to score a definitive victory over his opponent to captivate the world.
While Berto has already beaten top names in his division such as Carlos Quintana (the only man to have interrupted Paul Williams’s winning record), he has yet to get in the ring with a number of world class fighters, which has lead many to believe that he
hasn't yet proven himself.
"At the end of the day, realistically, the only thing that counts is a victory...Freddy Hernandez has been achieving [those] for his whole career. At the end of the day, the win is all that counts. But my mentality has definitely changed so that I'm a crowd-pleaser.
A lot of fighters don't care about the crowd situation and they just want to get a win. But I'm going to be myself and I believe that's really just going in there and not really looking to go the distance at all."
In others words, 'The Beast' is looking for a knockout.
Berto hopes to land fights with contenders Shane Mosley, Miguel Cotto, and possibly even Manny Pacquiao all by the end of 2011. While that doesn’t seem likely, considering the magnitude of these opponents, Berto insists on the possibility.
"I'm letting you know now that if it was all up to me, after Freddy Hernandez, if I could line things up for next year then it would be Shane Mosley, Miguel Cotto and then Manny Pacquiao...If I could get all three of them next year, you know, that would
be my route that I would want to go in. Then, I think that with that, I would be able to be satisfied."
Many insiders have criticized Berto in the past for ‘overpricing’ himself without having the requisite credentials to do so.
The situation is complicated by the fact that Berto has become an HBO darling, and has earned the money to back it up. In his fight with Quintana, he earned more than $1-million, setting a precedent he has been reluctant to erase. This makes scheduling
fights with others particularly difficult since financial terms aren’t easy to agree to.
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