By Steve Kim

It's been awhile since welterweight Shawn Porter has seen action. Back on June 25th he lost a close decision to Keith Thurman at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn, New York. So what's next for the 29-year old contender in 2017?

His father/trainer, Kenny, told BoxingScene.com - "Hopefully him and Andre Berto's cooking. That's the hope."

Last week Porter (26-2-1, 16 KOs) and Berto (31-4, 24 KOs) engaged in some back-and-forthing over social media. But as of now the match-up has not been consummated.

"We'll go through the process of whatever it is, whatever the offer is, we don't care - we're taking the fight," explained Porter. "But whatever it is, whatever the offer is for him that satisfied him in this situation and then after that my expectation is that he either says yes or no and then we come back and we say,'He won't take the fight,' and it's not because of the money, it's not because of the level because it's a  main event fight.

"We've already been told that it's on a major network. We've already been told that it's going to be at a major venue. We know that. So the only thing holding this up is Andre Berto."

When asked if he's concerned about his son inactivity, Porter admitted,"Yeah, absolutely we want to fight more, we need to fight more. It's part of what you deal with in this business. There's not many fighters that fight three or four times a year once they get to the world-class championship level. They don't. The Danny Garcias, the Keith Thurmans, the Shawn Porters, those guys just don't fight a lot once they get to that level but we're going to try to push for more in 2017.

"We waited for the Thurman fight and that took us a year to get it. So we wouldn't take anything before that because we didn't want to lose the Thurman fight."

So just how long will they wait for Berto to make a decision?

"We're not going to wait two or three months or anything like that because right now I would say we are scheduled to go in the beginning of April,"answered Porter."So if he doesn't take a fight with us we're moving forward."

Steve Kim is the news editor for BoxingScene.com.