Hatton - Ring Magazine Fighter of 2005

Part 1 By Brian Doogan (From The Ring Extra, April 2006: On sale February 7) It was dark and silent as Ricky Hatton gazed down Rock Street, stretching and shadow boxing by the front door of his home on the outskirts of Manchester. His demeanor was cheerful as he inhaled into his lungs the cool, crisp air, his mind completely unburdened by the masterly inquisitor he would soon be facing. “I have some fun planned for tonight,” he said, his eyes and feet dancing mischievously as he set off on his 2 a.m. run. “See, this time of night, I’m usually in my prime.” Only a few nights before, as he ran along Stockport Road, a taxi-load of his mates, all of them “steaming drunk,” drew up on their way home from a nightclub in Stalybridge. “Want a lift, Ricky lad? Climb in. The night’s not over yet,” they cried out, dropping their trousers and sticking their backsides out of the windows as the taxi crept past. Hatton vowed that he would get them back. “One morning last week I was right along here—I had the hood up on my jacket—and a police car pulled up alongside me,” Hatton said, breathing evenly, maintaining his stride, and throwing punches in impulsive bursts. “The officer got out and said, ‘Excuse me, mate. Do you mind me asking what you’re doing?’ When I stopped and turned around he recognized me. ‘Sorry, Ricky,’ he said. ‘I should have known it was you. Who else would be out running at two in the morning?’ “Everyone knows when I’m not fighting that I like to let my hair down and enjoy myself by downing a few pints. But when I go into training, this is all I do. I’ve been running or going to the gym at 2 a.m. because this is when the fight will be. I want to get my body clock adjusted. But it takes a bit of getting used to. The first morning I was out running, a fox came tearing out of a field and scampered right across my path. I was back home in record time, I can tell you. A couple of mornings later, I saw this plane flying past and I was convinced it was a UFO. I’m still convinced, I think. That morning I set another record. The first few mornings were a bit unnerving, no cars, no people, just silence mostly. And the mind can play tricks at this kind of hour.” Hatton had a trick or two to play himself. As he turned into the Hattersley estate, where he grew up and where many of his friends still live, he stopped at a succession of houses and started banging loudly on doors and windows until the occupants were awake and cursing him. “Come on, you so-and-so’s, rise and shine,” he shouted before moving on. By the time he returned home—where a message had been left on his phone by one of his mates whom he had just awakened “I hope that Russian knocks your head off”—he was almost in hysterics. “They won’t be shoving their arses out the window of a cab at me again,” he said and laughed. He was still laughing an hour later as he climbed the stairs and went off to bed. His fight with Kostya Tszyu, one of boxing’s most feared and long-standing world champions, was just 11 days away. * * * Working-class, a member of the darts team at his local pub, the New Inn, a passionate fan and season ticket-holder at Manchester City, the football club he has supported since he was a kid, the club that his father and grandfather both played for and where he once went for trials himself, these are Hatton’s points of reference, the defining features of one of the most appealing characters in British sport. When he trains in the old, converted hat factory, which also houses a gym full of Manchester’s most fanatical bodybuilders, he regularly attracts a throng of people including actors and athletes, footballers and writers and, tellingly, the friends he grew up with on the Hattersley Estate, a place made infamous in the 1960s by the series of child murders committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. “It’s a tough area, but a good area, and I’ve got the same friends now that I’ve always had and always will have,” said Hatton, sitting in the games room of his home and reflecting on the most extraordinary year of his life, a year in which he has reached the pinnacle of his profession while his personality has not changed one bit. “I live just five minutes away from the council estate I grew up on and 45 seconds round the corner from my mum and dad. I figured last year that it was time I moved out of my parents’ box room. But if I stood in my back garden and my mum stood in hers, honestly, we could have a conversation—and sometimes we do. Despite everything that’s changed in my life, I’m still the same person and I’ll always be this way and it would kill me if people ever thought different. I’m not a flash Harry. I’m no different to anyone else. I still shop at the local Tesco’s and drink with my mates at the New Inn, the pub my dad had for eight years. “The day after I beat Kostya, I was there for what we call our ‘sh_t shirt day,’ the idea being that people have to wear the worst shirt possible. This is just the way I am. I still look on myself as a little kid from Hattersley and I’ll never change.” The influences of his youth are simply too ingrained. He was 14 the night he was taken by his uncles, Ged and Paul, to Manchester’s Old Trafford stadium to sit with 40,000 people and watch the second fight between Nigel Benn and Chris Eubank. “That night I’d never have believed that years later so many people would come out in support of me,” he said of the impassioned, 22,000-strong crowd that filled the MEN Arena, the largest indoor arena in Europe, on the night he beat Tszyu, selling out the place quicker than when Mike Tyson fought in Manchester in 2000, quicker even than for the Achtung Baby tour stop made by U2. The epitome of northern England working-class pride, Hatton has struck a chord with the British public. Stars of the England football team are regular attendees at his fights, while actors and other celebrities feel compelled to be at ringside. “The way everything’s taken off, the way people have got behind me, it’s hard for me to comprehend,” Hatton revealed with mild bemusement. “When I look at The Ring championship belt, I can hardly believe it, I can hardly believe it’s mine, and now to be Fighter of the Year as well, it’s just incredible. A couple of years ago, Kevin Keegan, who was then the manager of Manchester City, was in the hospital recovering from a bad back and his assistant, Arthur Cox, asked me to come into the dressing room before a league match against Fulham to gee up the lads. Imagine that, being asked into the dressing room to gee up the lads before a match, a diehard City supporter! And if you’d ever told me that the Manchester City manager now (Keegan’s successor, Stuart Pearce) would actually be coming into my dressing room before my fights, that he’d be a mate, I’d never have believed it.” Hatton’s popularity is rooted in his down-to-earth personality. On Thursday nights he plays on the darts team for the New Inn, where he still comes to drink his mates under the table, to sing “Suspicious Minds” on karaoke night, to doll himself up to look like Spice Girl Geri Haliwell on fancy dress day. His father, Ray, who now manages the business side of his career, trained him as a carpet-fitter after he left school, but when he found him on the job one day, having sliced through three of his fingers, Ray knew he would have to find something safer for the older of his two sons to do. He made him a salesman. “He was crap at that, too,” Ray recalled with a smile, “selling the carpet at cost price, making no profit whatsoever. But that’s just Richard’s nature (at home Hatton is known by the name he was christened), to be nice to people, to be polite. That’s the way he was brought up to be.” He has always liked to party, too, and even now, when he is out of training, he is neither temperate nor vain.