ANDRE BERTO TKO8 CARLOS QUINTANA

It is clear now that Carlos Quintana doesn’t handle pressure too well. Andre Berto was just too strong for him in Saturday’s welterweight title fight that topped the bill on HBO’s World Championship Boxing show.

I thought that Berto showed a champion’s physical and mental toughness in fighting through the handicap of a possibly torn left biceps. He was letting fly with both hands, although the big right hand through the middle was the punch that blew Quintana out of the fight in the eighth round.

Quintana is awkwardly clever but he doesn’t have the durability or physical strength to hold off a determined aggressor such as Berto. We saw this in Quintana’s loss to Miguel Cotto and the first-round pounding by Paul Williams in their rematch. Quintana’s win over Williams in their first fight now looks more than ever to have been a fluke: the superior fighter simply had an unbelievably bad night.

Berto was looking to do something spectacular on a night that was special to him with its theme of extending a helping hand to Haiti, the homeland of his parents that suffered devastation in January’s earthquake.

For a while Saturday’s fight was something of a maul, but once Quintana started to waver it was a matter of time as Berto picked up the pace of his attack. The way Berto blasted through a bloodied and battered Quintana in the eighth was an impressive and exciting ending. Berto’s exciting finish puts him in a position to fight the big names at 147 pounds, if the matches can be arranged.

On the same show, Celestino Caballero got in 12 rounds of virtual sparring practice in his featherweight debut as he slapped around Daud Yordan.

The HBO commentary team felt that Yordan should have been rescued, but although the Indonesian boxer had no chance of winning I didn’t get the impression that he was being seriously punished. Caballero was belabouring him to the body but Yordan kept a high guard and I don’t think he took too many big shots to the head.

Going the full 12 rounds with Caballero was a moral victory for the plucky but outclassed Indonesian fighter. He fought well in the last two rounds, even staggering an off-balance Caballero with a left hook in the 12th. I got the impression that Caballero quite liked his much less experienced opponent and he seemed content to coast through the 12 rounds, although he opened up with barrages of punches whenever Yordan tried to steam into him, putting the youngster in his place, as it were.

Performance of the weekend came from welterweight crowd-pleaser David Estrada , who boxed and fought better than he has in a long time — maybe ever — in stopping the unbeaten Mexican Orlando Lora after eight rounds on ESPN2’s Saturday night boxing special.

Now this was a fight that I thought could have been stopped sooner. Lara was game and showed a good chin, but Estrada was landing so many shots to the head that it had one wincing. Lora’s trainer, Abel Sanchez, did the right thing in retiring his man after the eighth round. The bloodied Lora clearly wasn’t going to win, and for the first time he had taken on that “I’ve had enough of this” look.

Most dramatic win of the weekend was obviously Audley Harrison’s last-round knockout victory over Michael Sprott in their London bout for the vacant European heavyweight title. Harrison laboured under the handicap of an injury to his right shoulder, obliging him to switch from the southpaw stance to the orthodox position for long periods. Sprott had only to stand up to win in the 12th but he tried for a big finish, seemed to get a bit arm weary and went to the ropes, which was where Harrison drilled him with a beautifully timed left hand from the southpaw stance.

I have seen the finishing blow described as a left hook but, to me, it looked like a straight-through-the-middle shot. A southpaw can throw a left hook, just as an orthodox boxer can deliver a right hook, but these punches usually come when the boxer has moved into a squared-up posture (or, of course, if he switches stances).

The pet peeve of boxing oddsmaker legend Herbie Lambeck was reporters describing orthodox-stance boxers finishing a fight with a “right hook”. Herbie used to say: “They [boxers in the orthodox position] don’t throw right hooks.”

I would agree but perhaps add the modifier “rarely”.