Seeing Andre Berto briefly hit the canvas last night, and do a step or two of The Dance before righting himself… it wasn’t quite in the “Oh shit Roy Jones just got KTFO” category of shocker, but it wasn’t all that distant either. There was NO WAY that I expected to see Berto dropped last night, and he was dropped clean, on a beauty of a punch too, a moving bolo-style uppercut from Cosime Rivera at the end of the sixth round that Berto clearly never saw coming.

What Berto and his team learned last night is something along the lines of what Irish John Duddy learned last year when he fought Yory Boy Campas – old Mexican battleaxes are no guarantee for an easy “step up in competition” kind of night. Going into the bout with Berto, Cosme Rivera was a 31-year-old with ten losses whose biggest claim to fame was getting pantsed by Zab Judah with a TKO in the 3rd. But still, there was reason to suspect Rivera was at least a potentially dangerous spoiler to Berto’s coming-out party, because last October he exposed similarly hyped Joel “Love Child” Julio in what was supposed to be Julio’s big “step-up” bout. Rivera gave as good as he got in that thing and knocked Julio down in the 12th before losing a split decision that seemed very suspect on the whole (I would have called it a draw).

Last night, Rivera proved the same kind of problem for Berto, exposing the depth of his inexperience. It’s a classic phenomenon in boxing – we witnessed it recently when Edison Miranda met up with the brick wall named Kelly Pavlik – what does a young, overpowering fighter do when they are faced for the first time with an opponent who is not afraid of them? Berto came out last night launching his bombs, those frightening lasers that seemingly explode off his shoulders, and obviously expected that, like just about every fighter before him, Rivera would lay down at the first opportune moment. Instead, Rivera bobbed and weaved and slipped and picked his spots to counter, of which there were many. Berto’s punches, for as impressive as they look, are not tremendously precise, and defensively he’s working with next to nothing. He does not move his head at all, nor his whole upper body for that matter. He doesn’t come in at angles, or time his attacks behind combinations. He doesn’t slip punches, he backs off them, and he backs up straight and tall (which is what landed him on the canvas last night). All in all, he is a counter-puncher’s dream, so much so that a third-rate talent like Rivera was picking him apart with ease.

That said, Berto cleanly won the fight. He was the aggressor, he landed the more damaging blows (excepting, obviously, the knockdown punch) and he may have won every round other than the one in which he was knocked down (he benefited greatly, however, from some tomfoolery about his glove in his corner after the knockdown, which allowed him precious seconds to get off Queer Street). Certainly the bloom is off the rose with the young Haitian-American, and it should be – Cosme Rivera is not someone that you can imagine a young Floyd Mayweather, or even a young Miguel Cotto, having much trouble with. But unlike say, Jason Litzau, whose loss last December exposed him as an overhyped young fighter, I didn’t feel last night that we were seeing the ugly truth of Berto. In fact, there was a lot to admire. He was in over his head experience-wise, he hit the canvas and was briefly in trouble, and yet he came back with fury and conclusively punished Rivera in the late rounds. What Berto now faces is a fact that has eluded many a supremely talented athlete before him – there’s more to this game than raw power and speed (for more on this, see Miranda, Edison). Unfortunately for Berto, he’s not exactly dealing with all the time in the world. He better get himself at least a loose grasp on some defensive fundamentals before his September bout with David Estrada, because as anyone who witnessed Estrada’s bout with Kermit Cintron will attest, holms can take a serious punch and definitely has what it takes to scratch that bagel out of Berto’s loss column.