At the conclusion of every calendar year, the failure to agree to the most sought after fights, the authorities refusing to suitably punish drug cheats, and the decision making of the sanctioning bodies consistently prove cause for considerable disappointment.
Significantly tougher still is seeing the deterioration, in retirement, of some of the world’s most celebrated champions, and also learning of their deaths.
The unexpected death of the widely loved Ricky Hatton, however, was perhaps the boxing community’s hardest of all to learn of.
His impact on his profession, though more than worthy of his induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, was nothing like that of George Foreman, who died six months before Hatton. But where Foreman had been celebrated for generations as the most profoundly content and financially secure of individuals – and indeed was 76 years old when his death was confirmed – Hatton, 46 when he was found hanged at his home in Manchester, England, was on the eve of officially announcing an ill-advised comeback and was widely known to have struggled with depression and his mental health since the first of his three defeats, by Floyd Mayweather Jnr on that memorable night in 2007.
One of the sad realities of an unexpected-and-premature death surrounds the reality that the relevant individual died without truly knowing what they meant to not only those around them, but potentially to the wider world. Unlike when someone is diagnosed with a terminal illness and their loved ones are preparing for the death, there too rarely exists cause for that individual to be told.
Hatton was not only one of Britain’s finest ever fighters, he was perhaps also the most influential, and unquestionably the most loved of all time.
It was tempting, with the passage of time and the increasing influence of social media, to question whether those who came of age in the years after his prime were aware of the figure he had once been – despite the fight with Mayweather being at 5am in the UK, a record 1.2m pay-per-views were sold in a reflection of his compatriots buying into his dream. To conclude that the passage of time meant that an increasing number were aware that he was popular, but not about why.
In the years since he attracted a post-war record crowd to the City of Manchester Stadium for his fight with Juan Lazcano in 2008, Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury have been responsible for bigger crowds attending fights in British stadiums. Hatton, however, was more loved in defeat by Mayweather, Manny Pacquiao and Vyacheslav Senchenko than even Joshua was the night that he retired Wladimir Klitschko, and Fury was when he was being spoken of as the finest heavyweight of all time.
Hatton, ultimately, had an authentic and enduring bond with the loyal followers who repeatedly travelled with him to Las Vegas; unlike with Joshua and even Fury, Hatton was viewed as one of them and as a consequence, unlike with Joshua and Fury, he simply had to win.
“The Hitman” later returned to Vegas as the assistant to Ben Davison as Fury’s trainer, when Fury was the biggest figure in British boxing and Hatton – unusually and in many respects cruelly – was in the shadow of a bigger and more relevant name.
That in 2022 – long after Davison’s separation from Fury – Hatton entered an exhibition with Marco Antonio Barrera was a demonstration of the reality that the deafening silence of retirement was a struggle against which he was continuing to fight.
He was said by those closest to him to have been in a positive place when, 13 years into retirement, he agreed to return to a professional ring in Dubai in December, against the little-known Eisa Al Dah. He didn’t, however, make it to the first press conference to discuss his return. For reasons that remain unclear the fighter who had long been open about his struggles with suicidal thoughts, depression and addiction was said to have been found by his loyal manager Paul Speak having died by suicide. He was a father, a grandfather, and an International Boxing Hall of Fame boxer, but he ultimately never appeared to find a sense of peace.
The outpouring of grief that followed news spreading of his death provided proof not only of affection for Hatton from within the boxing community, but from a wider demographic within the UK. Hatton was again treated like a national treasure; those previously unaware of why he was so popular will have started to understand what he meant to his profession and country, and, almost reassuringly, his funeral represented almost an affair of the state.
Yet in every way in which those realisations were somewhat cathartic, Hatton was no longer alive to be able to draw comfort from them. An often-tortured soul died at a young age in a way that was as cruel as it was ill-fitting. Most tragically of all, he is no longer here.
Declan Warrington has been writing about boxing for the British and Irish national newspapers since 2010. He is also a long-term contributor to Boxing News, Boxing News Presents and Talksport, and formerly the boxing correspondent for the Press Association, a pundit for BoxNation and a regular contributor to Boxing Monthly, Sport and The Ring, among other publications. In 2023, he conducted the interviews and wrote the script for the audio documentary “Froch-Groves: The Definitive Story”; he is also a member of the BWAA.
