By Keith Idec
His opponent is a well-documented sports bettor, but Andre Berto insisted on a conference call Tuesday that he doesn’t even know the odds on his fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr.
Mayweather opened as an absurd 100-1 favorite when the fight was announced last month, but now is most commonly listed as a 35-1 favorite over Berto as their Sept. 12 welterweight title fight at MGM Grand in Las Vegas nears. The unbeaten Mayweather (48-0, 26 KOs) is such a heavy favorite because the five-division champion remains the best boxer in the sport while Berto (30-3, 23 KOs), though a former welterweight title-holder, is 3-3 in his past six fights.
Berto clearly couldn’t care less about any of those numbers.
“I don’t know the odds,” Berto said. “I haven’t looked at the odds. I mean, I don’t understand that, the odds. I’m over here training for a Floyd fight, to make history. I don’t take time out of my day to sit down and look at the odds and see what other people think. If that was the case, [shoot], I shouldn’t have made it out of where I came from. Because the odds of making it out of there is slim to none. You know what I mean? Slim to none.
“So if I would’ve looked at those odds, I would’ve been sitting my ass right over in Winter Haven [Florida], trying to figure it out, probably in the streets, smoking weed, wilding, just wilding the f*** out somewhere. You know what I’m saying? But I didn’t go by those odds, either. And in this situation, I don’t look at no odds, man. Where I come from, it was a lot worse than anything in that ring. Where my people come from is a lot worse than anything in that ring. So I don’t look at odds, bro. I just train hard, grind hard and I just push it to the limit. That’s it. I don’t do all that.”
Keith Idec covers boxing for The Record and Herald News, of Woodland Park, N.J., and BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.