There has always been an innocent and misguided temptation to limit Ricky Hatton’s status to that of the ‘people’s champion’. Such billing was well earned through blood and charm, but as we process the devastating, hollowing end of his life at 46, it is necessary to broaden the parameters of discussion.
For in the rawest of sporting contexts, he was also so much more. He was a champion of the world in two weight divisions and, furthermore, responsible for one of the greatest boxing upsets of all, certainly among bouts involving a British fighter.
We can talk more about Kostya Tszyu in a moment. Because we must. Because all roads go back to that night in Manchester 20 years ago this summer.
But unlike so many fighters, we can also talk about the glory of defeat. About what a loss can say about a man who never settled for being very good when great was on the table. He strived, he chased, he reached for the stars and there was no shame, none at all, in merely achieving the (blue) moon.
So he swung for Floyd Mayweather and walked onto a check hook. And he swung for Manny Pacquiao and ended up knocked out on the canvas within two rounds.
Those losses tortured him, lurking for years in the darkest corners of his soul, prompting talk of a comeback until his dying day, but they also made us love him more. They shrunk his record and grew his legacy. The everyman fighter who dared to be better.
Ricky Hatton, the former world champion and icon of British boxing, has died aged 46
Hatton wasn’t given much of a chance when he came up against Soviet-born Australian wrecking ball of Kostya Tszyu in 2005
He once outlined to me the weight of all his regrets, and he had a few, from the boozing, the drugs use, the consequences of a messy private life, and the context was an interview I did with him and his son Campbell at the outset of his professional career. It was in 2021.
We had a riot that day, going through the old classics, but there were long and earnest moments, too.
There always are when one man’s tale includes recollections of those many days of pondering suicide. And in this case, he was building to a point that he was perfectly placed to guide his son, a spitting image of the father, on what to expect from a life in the ring.
‘I am in a good position to give advice and he is in a good position to look at me and say, ‘I don’t want to do what that fat f***** did’,’ Hatton said at his gym. He was emotional when he spoke those words, and then his son added his view after a sagely nod: ‘That’s why I only go to the chippie four nights a week.’
I think back to that conversation and its mad undulations now because Hatton was so happy. He was energised, buzzing, loaded with new purpose. The next time we saw each other was a few months later on a boat off the coast of Gibraltar – Campbell was making his debut and Covid meant we all had to isolate together on a floating asylum.
One night I visited the gents and Hatton Sr was in there. He could barely stand and I nearly got caught in an unfortunate crossfire, which he found most amusing. He complimented my spelling and retreated to the bar – a surreal experience, really. And a surreal man, who at once was both so normal and so extraordinary.
The Tszyu fight was the one that took us all to that same page. June 5, 2005, MEN Arena. Tszyu was the holder of every belt in the light-welterweight division, a true pound for pound star of the sport, and unbeaten since 1997. Hatton? Well, he wasn’t given much of a chance. Or even ‘half a chance’, as he once told me.
Hatton won the hearts of fans in his native Manchester and across the country with his epic clashes at the MEN Arena
When we talk about Hatton, it is often overlooked that there were shades of a tactician within the warrior
He was the younger man by nine years that night in Manchester; a 26-year-old who was always game for a tear-up but he was a bleeder and had the scars around his eyebrows that told of his limitations.
I watched that fight on a screen and not in person and watched it again when the worst news broke on Friday. Jim Watt’s commentary came flooding back, delivered at around 2am due to the demands of an overseas audience.
‘There are no signs of decline,’ Watt said as Tszyu climbed through the ropes. ‘We know what this man is capable of. There are no weaknesses whatsoever. I have to hope against hope that father time catches up with him. I have to be honest, we have to wish Ricky all the best for taking this challenge on.’
He made Tszyu quit on his stool and few shocks have boomed so loudly around the world. He was all balls and grit and cunning and just the right amount of devil – when Tszyu, getting desperate in the later rounds, started to hit him low, Hatton smacked him in the nuts in return. Transpires he had the presence of mind to know the referee would never deduct a point, not there, and not after Tszyu had gotten away with so much.
That is one of my abiding memories. The rest is how he just kept walking forward, swallowing those right hands that had traumatised the light-welterweight division. When Hatton griped of his exhaustion after the ninth, he was brought back to life by his coach, Billy Graham, one of those wild characters of boxing whose conversations could veer in a heartbeat from the mechanics of a jab to his collection of exotic reptiles.
To go by Hatton’s recollection, Graham said: ‘I don’t want to hear that from you, we knew we would be in this position one day and if you’re not man enough to take advantage you’re not the fighter we’ve been telling everyone you was.’
Hatton had legacy defining duals against welterweight titans Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao
Hatton was forever tortured by his high-profile losses. By the sense of an unfulfilled legacy
Hatton become the first British boxer to be named the Ring Magazine’s fighter of the year, in 2005
Through such baiting, Hatton became champion. Through such an ensemble, we loved him every step of the way.
We know that when push came to shove, when he faced Mayweather and Pacquiao, that they ended with the lights out and other shades of darkness.
But he always had that night against Tszyu and others like his successful step up to welterweight, when he beat Luis Collazo across 12 draining rounds in Boston to become a two-weight world champion. The best punch he ever threw? To my mind it was the liver shot to beat Jose Luis Castillo in Las Vegas in 2007. Violence repurposed as art.
Where does he stand? That feels like an arbitrary debate right now and one where an elevated ranking is of scant consolation. For popularity, only Henry Cooper, another bleeder, and Frank Bruno come close. Fine company to be in and brave birds of a feather.
As a boxer? He wasn’t as comprehensively talented as Naseem Hamed, Joe Calzaghe, Lennox Lewis or Tyson Fury, in a vaguely modern reckoning, but he had the guts to match any of them. And he could hit like a mad donkey, too, as 32 knockouts ought to prove.
That he became the first English boxer to be named the Ring Magazine’s fighter of the year, in 2005, 85 years after its inception, tells such a story.
‘Aye, not bad for a fat twat,’ Hatton told me when we chatted a few years ago. Not bad at all. To call him the people’s champion just doesn’t cover it.
