A Boxing Memory: Ricky Hatton

A Boxing Memory: Ricky Hatton:

By Garry White 

If you are from my generation and maintain even the most casual interest in boxing, then there is only a finite volume of British names that you are likely to immediately recall. If you don’t want to tax the grey matter too much, then Tyson Fury or Anthony Joshua shouldn’t be too hard to come up with. If you’d like to step back a little further, you’ll readily recall David Haye – hopefully the dominant cruiserweight version, before Wladimir Klitschko, the sore toe, and the Tony Bellow cash grab. Those trying a little harder may wish to resuscitate Lennox Lewis or disappointed childhood memories of big Frank Bruno. Outside the heavyweights, you could easily conjure up Amir ‘King’ Khan or the matchless ability but insufferable bombast of ‘Prince’ Naseem Hamed in his pre-Marco-Antonia Barrera incarnation. But eventually, amongst all of these, sooner or later you’ll settle upon the name of Ricky ‘The Hitman’ Hatton.

If Jarvis Cocker was to wake you up in the year 2000, as he promised more than a quarter of a century ago, you would have been unlikely to notice the newly crowned British light welterweight champion from the Hattersley Estate in Hyde, Greater Manchester. His achievements and personality were then merely an indiscernible sporting footnote to the red half of Manchester’s Premier League dominance and England’s latest ignominious failure at Euro 2000. But wait patiently for a year, and with the securing of the WBU title, an accolade then undoubtedly more worthy than it is now but still one that Gerald Ratner could term “crap” without being taken too heavily to task – you would steadily have seen Hatton punch his way into your consciousness. 

The sad thing is that the vast majority of The Hitman’s career coincided with my own estrangement from boxing. I had seen enough in the alphabet soup of sanctioning bodies and ‘world’ titles to want no further part of it. I had even stopped buying Boxing Monthly and given up on browsing through the latest out-of-date copy of The Ring in my local Newsagents. Looking back, I am sure I would have scoffed at Hatton’s World Boxing Union strap as the cubic zirconia-encrusted strip of leatherette that it probably was. But, even so, it was still a period in my life where there was zero chance of me ever being at home on a Saturday night to watch Gladiators, Noel’s House Party, or Jonathan Creek. And so it was that I mostly saw Hatton’s story unfold on big grainy screens in a myriad collection of sticky-carpeted South Coast pubs – a situation of which no doubt the great man would surely have approved!

Maybe that was Hatton’s secret. To reach his prime years at a time when live sport was just beginning to find its way into your local boozer. When rather than sitting at home on your sofa nursing a warm can of Carling, you could share in these moments by drinking more expensive draft pints of warm Carling in the hospitable climes of any town centre hostelry. For me, that dipso journey all began in those curtained, ‘Mad for it’ days of Euro 96. A halcyon time writ in day-glow in my memories as though it had been captured in the sunny paradoxical colours of the under-appreciated 2001 movie Goodbye Charlie Bright.

But when it came to watching Hatton fight, there was no long hot summer for me. I don’t recall his British title success over John Thaxton at the Wembley Conference Centre in late 2000. I also have no memory of him stopping Tony Pep in four rounds at the same venue for the WBU strap the following spring. Of the Mancunian’s four defences that same year, only Freddie Pendleton has any name recognition to me. The likes of Jason Rowland, John Bailey, and Justin Rowsell prove utterly elusive to the ravages of time. That they were all despatched in under five rounds perhaps also doesn’t help their cause. Yet, at around the same time, I can vividly recall Robin Reid stopping the game but ludicrously outclassed nightclub bouncer Mike Gormley in a one-round defence of his WBF ‘title’ on Sunday Grandstand. Sure, I could use BoxRec and old fight reports to claim vicarious memories of a youthful Hatton. But what would be the point of that?

In the four years between that victory over Pep and Hatton’s unchallengeable night of glory against the waning Kostya Tszyu at the Manchester Arena, there had been a Joe Louis-like fifteen defences of the black and gold WBU belt. The strap was emblazoned with the sanctioning bodies three-letter acronym in vivid red font to differentiate it, no doubt, from its similarly coloured and more illustrious rival. Yet, amidst all this, there is not one fight, round, or punch that I can remember. That is strange because I know with near certainty that some of these fights I would definitely have watched live or read about in the Sunday papers. It may seem an odd thing to admit about a fighter who fully lived up to his Hitman nickname; especially against the calibre of opposition that his promoters and the WBU were happy to wheel out for him. But all I can conjure up now is an uncontextualized memory of passing a pub on Bournemouth’s Old Christchurch Road and seeing Hatton through the window on the screen. Did I stop for a moment and let my thoughts flicker over an inevitable Hatton attack: a competent, well-armed, unrelenting Elmer Fudd pursuing an out-of-luck Bugs Bunny? Or did I just walk straight on by? I really can’t remember.

Isn’t it strange what our mind chooses to remember and discard?

But the other stuff I do remember; the non-fighting stuff: Del boy’s three-wheeled van and Hatton looking out of my newspaper in his Peckham heroes flat cap and sheepskin. The gutbuster breakfasts and monster sessions on the Guinness. The ballooning weight abruptly followed by training camp starvation. I remember all of that, even the glorious cast of misfits that formed his entourage – something that I respected him for. Hatton seemed true to his roots and his code, like a sickly pale-skinned Gary Cooper. There was no Hamed-esque bullshit. What you saw appeared to be the sum total of what you got. Honest. Old-school. Working-class hero. So, tell me, is this what it’s like for everyone else? To just see boxing as inconsequential background noise or disengaged lift music. 

Something to casually dip in and dip out of, to absentmindedly open half an eye to, but never to immerse yourself so deeply in it as to roll with the punches. It existing as nothing more than a curiosity to be briefly picked up and put down like a distracted child with a fidget spinner. Something condemned to exist completely without depth or nuance. My investment in prime-time Hatton was unashamedly of this perfunctory nature. 

Yet by the time Hatton fought Kostya Tszyu at the Manchester Arena, I had partially begun to wake up. Like every good ‘casual’ the media glare of Hatton’s belated shot at a bone-fide world title [IBF] had grabbed my attention. The buzz around the fight was electric among football fans and sports generalists, even among those who were still inarticulate at navigating boxing’s Cyrillic alphabet of sanctioning bodies and belts. Everyone knew this was a big fight because SKY and the newspapers had told us so. In many respects, it was the final staging post between the last remnants of post-war 20th-century boxing. A domain where fight posters were still slopped onto walls and newsprint was still king, a place where pay-per-view was increasingly raising its head, but mercifully the 24-hour misery of social media and planks with cameras had yet to arrive.

I remember wanting Hatton to beat Tszyu. Partly out of age-old patriotic allegiance, but doubly so because I had grown to like the Mancunian. His style was essentially that of an old-school pressure fighter, an uncompromising come-forward breed; willing to dish it out and take it. As a style, it is typically one that is destined to be popular but not always imbued with longevity. Yet, at the same time, there was a hint of the maverick about Hatton. His determination to not change at any cost. To pin his identity unremittingly to the Hyde council estate where he grew up, was in some ways at odds in a sport predicated on rags-to-riches climbs from hardship to mansion [and sadly often back again]. There was nothing flash about him: his fighting style, like the man, was resolutely blue-collar. For those of us who marvelled at Naseem Hamed’s abundant skills but baulked at his often-tasteless excesses, Hatton was the perfect antidote.

When Hatton forced Tszyu to retire on his stool at the end of the eleventh round in front of the Manchester faithful, it was a supreme sporting moment. The churlish could argue that the 35-year-old Russian-Australian was already on his way down [this, after all, was his last ring appearance], and there may be some merit in this. But when the great feel-good moments occur, the inner details are so often irrelevant. This was one of those golden everyman moments of pure sporting transcendence. And it didn’t matter if we were all drunk, knew none of the details, and our back story was supplied by SKY or the Daily Mirror – all that mattered was that Ricky won and that we were fully invested.

And undoubtedly, there was always something about Hatton that made you want to love him but at the same time understand that perhaps inevitably one day you would also be pre-determined to pity him. That happens with pressure-fighters; those who ship blows to the head as an inevitable part of their commitment to winning. Their careers can suddenly evaporate as the accumulation of punches overreaches its high watermark and removes their resistance. Leaving nothing but a pathway to confusion and darkness; not just in the ring but in that vast expanse beyond. An entry into a world of misplaced words, forgotten faces, a tenuous paper-thin hold on the present and the past.

After that magical June night in 2005, Hatton would go onto greater triumphs, adding the WBA, WBC, and IBO belts to his resume – this being boxing he never held all of them at the same time. Inevitably, he fought Floyd Mayweather at the MGM Grand. British fans flocked to Vegas in the same way that they once did for Frank Bruno. Hatton and Frank both had that transcendence, the ability to get others to buy into their dream, to roll with the punches with them, even if it was only for a single night and resolutely on our terms. This was a battle of the Prince and the Pauper; of egg and chips down the local caff against Caviar consumed from a golden throne. Not for the first time royalty won, and Hatton and his travelling hoards traipsed back to McCarron airport dejected. Worse still, Hatton would go on to be poleaxed at the same venue by Manny Pacquaio – still, there is no shame in being outclassed by two genuine all-time greats- and it is revealing that this picture of the prone, utterly broken former-two-weight world champion was used as the centrepiece for the recent SKY documentary, simply, titled ‘Hatton’.

A picture of the many nights of triumph could have been selected, but instead, it zeroed in on his worst night between the ropes. At its heart surely is the metaphor that the Hitman is down, but not out. This is despite family estrangement, attempted suicide, issues with drugs, and their resulting Sunday paper exposes. The message is that in life, just like in his greatest nights in the ring, Hatton is resolutely fighting back. It is a homage of sorts to the modern mantra of catching everyone at their lowest ebb and charting their tell-all/no-holds-barred ‘journey’ back. 

There we have it again. That grim reality that so many of us foresaw, however absentmindedly as an inevitable dark backdrop to those glory days of two decades hence. What was it, Bruce Springsteen, once sang?

‘Glory days, well they’ll pass you by

Glory days, in the wink of a young girl’s eye’.

And it is heartbreakingly true that such superficial love can so easily turn to pity, sometimes to ridicule, anonymity, and even hate. But there is something about Ricky and his intendant paradoxes that tells us he might be okay. Think back to those golden days: the frame was always strong yet seemingly pale and vulnerable. It was like someone had kidnapped Jimmy White from his local snooker club, put gloves on the Whirlwind, and sent him into a six-month training camp. Hatton’s complexion, like White’s, was forever sallow to the extent that it almost seemed to repel the sun. Perhaps, it could only be illuminated by dusk and the suggestion of the nefarious. The pints of Guinness and bacon butties never quite being sweated out, no matter the effort in the gym and ring. 

Britain has always had an affection for this type of everyman sportsman that never really fades. Despite the inevitable temptation to wallow or worse glory in their fall. But, whatever the truth, in modern tell-all parlance, it is our ‘truth’ that matters as much to us as Hatton’s and how we choose to remember him or not. Future generations will sift through BoxRec and some will take the opportunity to negatively dissect his record, but for those of us who lived those post-millennium glory days, well we will always feel an affection for Ricky ‘The Hitman’ Hatton. Even those of us that ashamedly can’t remember much of it at all!