He’s just 5ft 7in and a Manchester ‘scallywag’ who loves curry and chips. But Ricky Hatton is also Britain’s most exciting boxer, and is facing the fight of his career. Can he become a fully fledged national hero?
They came, in late September, to Manchester’s Albert Square – 3,000 of them, mostly young men in tracksuits and crew cuts – with too few umbrellas. They came to be part of Ricky Hatton’s homecoming “Fan Rally”, the culmination of a two-continent, six-day promotional tour to plug Hatton’s fight against the world’s finest boxer, Floyd Mayweather, on December 8. But the weather was threatening to turn the event into a swimming gala.
Still they came, many of them hours early, and sang Blue Moon, the anthem of Hatton’s beloved Manchester City, and the brass band played There’s Only One Ricky Hatton as many times as their freezing lips would allow. By the time their man arrived on stage, with rain dripping from the fronds of his schoolboy fringe, the crowd had arranged itself into groups of five or six men huddling under shared umbrellas.
The fight will be one of British boxing’s biggest nights, and evidence that, despite the sport’s crisis of confidence over the past decade – despite its tarnished reputation and diminishing place as prime-time entertainment – it still has the ability to create one-off spectaculars. It may now be impossible, as it was once, to name eight world champions at the traditional weights. Indeed, there are now more than 60 belt champions at 17 weights, and Hatton, who has refused mandatory defences of his world titles, isn’t one of them.
But belts matter less and less. Everyone knows who the real stars of boxing are. They are the men who have fought, and beaten, the best. They are the ones with zeros in the loss column. And when those stars meet, as Mayweather and the wildly popular six-weight world champion Oscar de la Hoya did on May 5 this year, more than 2m people are prepared to pay to watch the fight on satellite television.
Hatton and Mayweather will be one of those nights. The two undefeated boxers, the world’s best light-welterweight and the world’s best pound-for-pound fighter – one a Guinness-quaffing white working-class Englishman, the other a trash-talking, hip-hop-producing black American – will clash at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, in a bout estimated to gross around £60m. But, on this filthy September day in Manchester, the fight was still more than two months away. Why risk pneumonia to come to a rally?
One shelterer looked faintly puzzled by the question. “‘Cause it’s our Ricky,” he replied. Our Ricky. His name may not mean much to those of you with Agas. But in the old working-class neighbourhoods of Manchester and the northwest, where Ricky “the Hitman” Hatton first learnt he had a devastating left hook, his reputation grows daily. Boxing has made him. Undefeated in 43 fights, and a six-belt, two-weight champion, the 5ft 7in dynamo is the world’s best light-welterweight, and one of only two Brits (the other is the Welshman Joe Calzaghe) currently in the world top 10 pound-for-pound fighters. With his aggressive counter-punching style, Hatton is also the most electrifying boxer in the world to watch. His appeal as a boxer, though, cannot explain the affection this unassuming 29-year-old has garnered. It cannot explain why two school-leavers have taken out £5,000 loans to travel to Las Vegas to see him fight. It cannot explain why over 33,000 fans put their names on the list for an allocation of 3,900 tickets, or why 20,000 fans will travel to Vegas knowing they have no chance of seeing the fight live.
British boxing has been short on heroes lately. We have had champions, like Lennox Lewis and Calzaghe. We have had amiable nearly-men, like Frank Bruno and Danny Williams. We have contenders, like our Olympic silver-medallist Amir Khan. But none has become bigger than its sport. The closest British boxing has come to producing a folk hero is Bruno, and he always failed to match his popularity outside the ring with accomplishments within.
But, in Manchester at least, Hatton is becoming such a boxer. How? He is, in his own words, “a rummer, a pubber, a clubber… a likkle scallywag”, no different from anybody else. He has, he imagines, probably had a pint with most of the 33,000 people who tried to buy tickets for his fight against Mayweather. On the night of December 8, win or lose, he will drain a pint with a few more.
In person he is endearing. His heavy east-Mancunian accent is tempered by an inability to pronounce his middle Ts, so words like “texts” and “little” come out as “tekses” and “likkle”. It’s enough to make you want to give him a hug, until you remember that the last person to do so was the Mexican hard man Jose Luis Castillo – and he received a liver punch that stopped his breathing for two minutes.
Unlike the footballers in their gated creches in Alderley Edge, Hatton refuses to abandon his roots. He still lives within five minutes of where he grew up, on the Hattersley estate, a spillover on the eastern outskirts of Manchester. It is an area made infamous for being the home of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the moors murderers (while, just down the road, Dr Harold Shipman killed hundreds).
Through his fame, Hatton has made new friends – Wayne Rooney, David Beckham, Gazza – but he has never lost his old ones. Indeed, his best friends are from Hattersley high school. He still plays darts on a Thursday night for the New Inn, the pub his parents used to own. And despite his wealth – it is estimated that Hatton, already worth £12m, will earn £5m from this fight alone – his six-year-old son, Campbell, attends the local primary school where his father went. This is the legend of Ricky Hatton,
and everybody one meets in Manchester – in particular the eastern stretch from Gorton through Denton, Hyde and Gee Cross – can recite it. Any taxi driver, publican or teacher will tell you: that Ricky Hatton, he’s a great lad. No airs or graces. Money and fame haven’t affected him. Always got time for everybody.
That’s just the way Hatton likes it. “I’d like to think not a single thing has changed in how I act between when I didn’t have a pot to piss in and now,” he says. “I think people watch me first because I’m an exciting fighter. But I think they watch me too because they look on me as a mate. I love the fact that when I go into a pub or a club, people will say, ‘I’n’t he a good lad?’ I’d be devastated if people thought I was up my own arse. I’d die.” He’d die? That sounds serious. To understand how serious, one has to understand where and how he grew up. One has to understand that when one is a good-news story in an area that has produced two of Britain’s most notorious cases of mass murder, leaving is not an option. And one has to understand that when a boxer is going into the ring against the world’s greatest fighter, it helps if he has a few thousand mates on his side.
His family call him Richard. Ricky was a name thought up by a marketing man at Sky Sports early in Hatton’s career. To his nearest and dearest, he is still the same Richard as on the day he was born, on October 6, 1978, in Stepping Hill hospital in Stockport.
His parents, Carol and Ray, met as teenagers on the Hattersley estate, where their parents had moved when the inner-city terraced nightmares of West Gorton were demolished in the 1960s. By the time Richard was born, Carol and Ray were married, and had bought a cottage in the Peak District village of Hayfield, near Glossop. Ray – briefly a professional footballer with Manchester City before a career-terminating achilles tendon injury – found employment fixing brake linings for Ferodo Ltd, while his wife worked there as a secretary.
When Richard was 18 months old, and with his younger brother Matthew on the way, the Hattons bought their first pub, the Oddfellows Arms in Hyde. They were there for two years. Next they took over the Bowling Green in Marple – a pub so rough Ray was forced to keep a cosh behind the bar – where, in the absence of staff, little Richard would help his parents clean up before service. After two years at the Bowling Green, they moved back near their parents, to the New Inn pub on the Hattersley estate.
Ask Richard where he was born and he will tell you the Hattersley estate. He’s not a liar – he just finds it simpler to keep things simple. Press him on details and in the next sentence he will happily tell you that he was born in Stockport, lived in Hayfield, Hyde and Marple before he lived in the New Inn. But in his head, Hattersley was where he was born – as a boxer, anyway.
As a friendly, workshy student at Mottram primary school – “I was never no trouble at school, only once got in a fight, which I won” – he discovered he could punch. Already an able footballer, later on the books of Manchester City’s School of Excellence, he first began kick-boxing above the Imperial pub at the age of 10 after watching too many Bruce Lee films. His kick-boxing career, though, was short-lived. “His legs were too little,” explains his father. “Once he got inside, and he could use his fists, it would always be good night, Vienna. But it was getting there. His coach suggested Richard try boxing.” Not a bad suggestion, as it turns out. In his teens, Hatton represented his country at age-group level, won every amateur title available, and took bronze at the World Junior Championships – a medal he will no longer look at, so cheated does he feel at being outpointed in his semi-final.
When he was finishing his studies at Hattersley high school, his father was in the process of giving up the New Inn and starting his own carpet business, ‘R’ Carpets, in Gorton. Richard went to work for Ray for two years as a carpet-fitter. “I was on my hands and knees all day,” recalls Richard. “I’d be rolling out carpets, fitting carpets. When I used to train with the professionals in the evening, I’d see all these guys who just used to drive to the gym with their kit in the boot and get paid for doing something they loved. I thought, ‘I’m on my hands and knees all day!’ That’s when I knew, definitely, I wanted to be a professional.”
Hatton isn’t hard to find. When he’s training – and he trains for 12 or 13 weeks before a fight – he spends every weekday from 1pm to 3pm at Billy “the Preacher” Graham’s Phoenix gym in Denton, and every evening pounding the streets of Hyde. Situated on the third floor of the old Moores hat factory, past a sign saying “No Work Boots”, the gym lies at the far end of the huge Betta Bodies bodybuilding club. Graham’s gym is no palace. Two feet from the door stands the full-size boxing ring. Skirt around the outside of the ring, past the windows and the blazing radiators, and one reaches four punchbags. In the middle of the gym is a long wooden plank, on trellises, with crash mats either side. This is the instrument of torture known as “the bar”, which Graham’s fighters are required to bounce over for minutes on end. To the left of the bar is the changing room, and to the right is Graham’s glass-fronted office, and, if one can find him through the fug of cigarette smoke that accompanies his presence, Billy Graham.
Hatton’s trainer looks like a closing-time nightmare. A thickset ex-boxer in his fifties with heavily tattooed arms, he is deaf in one ear, and has the kind of gnarled face you might see hanging from Notre Dame. But get him talking in his rich Salford tones, and he opens up like a book. “I can picture him as a 17-year-old walking in the door of my gym in Salford,” he says. “Nose pushed in, thickset, strong kid, looked like a boxer. Didn’t have a cocky walk, which a lot of kids do. I’d heard all these things about Richard Hatton, and lots of people had told me that he was the best thing since sliced bread. Others had told me he was just a strong kid, and when everyone his age caught up with him he’d be nothing special.
“At that time my gym was full. I had Carl Thompson, a world champion, in my gym. I had the British champion at Ricky’s weight [10 stone], as well as a lot of good contenders at that weight. But I thought, let’s have a look at the kid. First thing I did was, I told him to get changed. I wanted to have a look at him naked. I saw he had a massive back and massive thighs, and I thought, yeah, they’re right: he’s just a strong kid. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The first round I saw him spar, the hair physically stood up on the back of my neck. That only happens when you see a great mover, a great fighter. He was doing little flashes of stuff that kids his age shouldn’t be able to do. He was the best 17-year-old I’d ever seen, and I told him right then that if he tried and he wanted it bad enough, he could do anything he wanted.”
Twelve years after Graham’s George Best moment, he is still Hatton’s trainer. And Hatton still doesn’t have a cocky walk. When he comes into the gym, which, by 1.15pm, already contains his two gym-mates, his younger brother Matthew – a slimmer version of Richard – and the leading Irish contender, Matthew Macklin, he does so without fanfare. Dressed in a light blue tracksuit, with an Englishman-abroad sunhat pushed down over his face, he simply strolls to the changing room, offers “Y’all right, mate?” to his friends, and closes the door.
Ten minutes later he is shadow-boxing in the ring. Today is a Tuesday, an “easy day”, where Ricky goes through some technical pieces with Billy before meeting his nutritionist, and the owner of the Betta Bodies club, Kerry Kayes, to push weights. Kayes is a genial ex-bodybuilder who has his own nutrition company. He works for Hatton for nothing. “Nice way to spend your lunch hour, i’n’t it?” he jokes.
The gym begins to fill up with a few punters, who sit on plastic seats by the door. Graham’s gyms have always been open to the public, and on any given training day a few locals will check in on their world champion. At the end of the session, Hatton will lean over the ropes, chat and sign a couple of autographs. “I think it’s good for people like Ricky to be accessible to normal kids from the street,” says Graham. “He likes it too.” For the first time in his training career, however, Graham has now been forced to close the gym on “heavy days” – Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays – when Hatton will do his most intense bag-work and, nearer the fight, start sparring. “It’s not something I want to do, but we get so many in here I sometimes think the floor’s going to fall in,” he says. “It’s too much pressure for Ricky to be sparring in front of all those people.”
Watching Hatton shadow-box, you feel sorry for the shadow. As he fires off combinations against his imaginary opponent, surprisingly nimble on his stocky legs, he emits a kind of grunt-cum-wail that makes you wince. When the blows have been raining in for the third, fourth or fifth round, and he starts to look a little tired, he lets out a little high-pitched whoop, jumps up with both feet in the air, and redoubles his efforts. Over a cup of tea after training, I ask him about the whoop. “That’s the moment when I’m feeling dead tired,” he laughs. “It’s me saying to meself: come on, keep going.”
Hatton needs to work harder in the gym than most boxers. His between-fight diet of Guinness, curry and chips makes his weight balloon. He has weighed as much as 13 stone 4lb in his off-season – which, when you are trying to reach 10 stone, requires some training. Indeed, Kayes recalls that in 2004, when Hatton had four fights, his yo-yoing weight meant he lost a total of 13 stone in a year. His trainers hate it – “It’s terrible, terrible!” says Kayes – but they know he won’t change. “Well, I have had a lot on me plate lately,” he often deadpans. “Listen, I’ve won six world-title belts, and I’m trying to beat the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, so you can’t say it doesn’t work,” he says. “I feel like I have to be out of shape to get in shape. I need to look at myself and say, ‘You fat bastard, get back in the gym.’ If I didn’t worry about my weight, I honestly don’t think I’d be half the fighter.”
Hatton’s been a professional for 11 years. He has beaten everyone who has been put in front of him – although perhaps only two truly tough opponents, the previously indomitable Australian Kostya Tszyu and Mexico’s Jose Luis Castillo – and he has earned enough to mean he will never have to work again. He will now attempt to conquer the world’s best. His motivations are complex. “I get more nervous now before fights than I ever did,” he says, “because I know the stakes are higher. I’m not afraid of getting hurt – as a kid I’d sometimes think about that, but I’m battle-hardened now. I’m nervous about what I could lose financially. Every fight goes towards my retirement fund. Of course, I go for glory first. But I know with glory comes something massive for my family.”
By his family he means himself, his girlfriend, Jennifer Dooley – who, in keeping with the Hatton legend, was in his brother Matthew’s class at primary school – and his son, Campbell. Campbell’s mother, Claire, and Hatton broke up soon after the baby was born, but they were prudent enough to set up a trust fund for the boy. Claire and Richard are still friends, and Campbell sees both parents most days.
Ray Hatton deals with the money. All fees earned through Richard’s boxing are paid to Punch Promotions, a company run by his father and an accountant, David Evans. Punch Promotions is the business arm of Ricky Hatton: it pays for training fees, legal fees and whatever else Hatton the boxer needs. Punch Promotions also pays him a weekly salary – enough for him to enjoy his corporate box at Manchester City, go out with his friends and live a comfortable life, but no more. The rest of the money goes into a trust fund for Richard and Campbell.
Ray pays himself £1 a year as the director of Punch Promotions, “just to make it legal”, but has played a key role in guiding his son. He and Team Hatton’s lawyer, Gareth Williams, negotiated the latest deal with Mayweather and with Oscar de la Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions on their own. Williams first acted for the Hattons when, in 2005, Hatton’s old promoter, Frank Warren, threatened legal action because his charge wished to leave him.
The relationship between the Hattons and Warren remains complicated. The contractual row came down to a simple argument: whether Hatton had made an agreement with Warren. The promoter claimed he had, and was prepared to use the courts to prove it, while Williams claimed Hatton had done no such thing. Eventually Warren dropped his case, and parted company with Hatton, but there was more to come. Warren sued Ray Hatton and the BBC for libel after Ray said Warren had endangered his son’s health. The BBC retracted. There are still legal proceedings in play against the publishers of Hatton’s ghosted autobiography, where similar claims are made. But among all this, Ray Hatton, Williams and Warren were able to sit down to discuss the possibility of working together again. For now, at least, Team Hatton, are a solo outfit, working with promoters on short contracts, and deciding Ricky’s future for themselves. “Richard is terrible with money,” says his father. “He’s just not interested. As long as he gets his weekly salary, he’s happy. I’ve been in meetings with promoters where we’ve struck up a deal, and Richard hasn’t asked me what deal we got. He’ll just say, ‘Were you happy with it, Dad?’ and that’s enough for him. It’s a huge compliment, in a way. I honestly don’t think he knows how much he’s worth.”
Ray insists the only thing he and Carol have ever received from their famous son is a pair of Rolex watches as a present. They refuse to accept money. “Why would we?” asks Ray. “I’ve worked hard – three pubs, successful carpet business. Carol still sells carpets out in Glossop market. I’m looking to retire in a couple of years on the back of the graft I’ve put in here. It doesn’t annoy me so much, but it does annoy Carol, that everyone thinks our cars, or our holidays, are paid for by Richard. They’re not. We wouldn’t let him. They also can’t understand that everything I do for my son – pay his bills, sort out his finances, negotiate new contracts for him – I do for free. [Richard] gets frustrated. He’s begged me to give up the carpets and to go and work for him full time. To be paid by the company. He says, ‘How do you think it makes me feel? I can’t do owt for you.’ I say, ‘We don’t need owt.’ ”
By Billy Graham’s office is a wall of photographs. One shows Ricky sitting with his old mate (and, judging by his constant delivery of pat one-liners, comedy inspiration) Bernard Manning, both men wearing nothing but white Y-fronts. Another shows Ricky in drag, with a long blonde wig. Another shows Graham, and some brave wag has drawn a speech bubble saying: “My fighters are murderros punchos.”
Murderros Punchos, as Ricky might say on one of his after-dinner speaking engagements, is not the name of a Mexican flyweight. It is, however, an acute reflection of Graham’s Salford patter, and his tendency towards hyperbole.
But, as much as boxers and trainers talk about “killing” their opponent, theirs is a sport in which death makes only rare, accidental appearances. Where Hatton grew up, he knew all about real murderers. After training one Monday in October, he drives me in his sleek new Mercedes – a gift from a sponsor – around his old stamping ground. He takes me out east to Hyde, where, for what must be the 10th time since we’ve known each other, he mentions Dr Harold Shipman. “Look,” he says, “just there. Where the appliance shop is. That used to be his surgery.”
As we speed out of Hyde, he shows me the Hattersley estate, its grey slabs offset against the valleys and peaks beyond, and a new development called Hatton Court – named after the estate’s most famous son. “It makes me dead proud to say this is where I came from,” he says as we drive into the estate. “When I think it was only a few years ago I was running up and down playing football here with my pals… My two grandmas still live here, and all my mates. I never get mithered here – everyone just leaves me alone. That’s how I like it.
“I suppose when people think of this area,they do think about Shipman and the moors murderers,” he says. “Everyone round here knows someone who was affected by Shipman.” Did Hatton? “Yeah, I was at school with his lad.” He clams up at this point, but the story checks out. Not only was Hatton at Mottram primary school with Shipman’s second youngest son, David, but they were also in the same class. Ray once drove Richard to David’s birthday party at the Shipman family home in Roe Cross Green. No wonder Shipman is burnt into Hatton’s consciousness.
“I hope now, because of what I’ve achieved, people don’t think just bad things about the area,” he continues. “You couldn’t wish to meet nicer people than the people who live here.”
Soon we enter Gee Cross, the village near Hattersley where Richard, Matthew, and Ray and Carol all now live – albeit in different houses. “That’s my house – big white one at the top,” he says. “And here’s my hairdressers – £5.50 for me haircut; no hairs or graces here, like. This is the Lamb down here. This is the chippy. Good chippy. And me newsagent, bakers, chemists, barbers, all in 10 yards of each other.”
Hatton’s house is known by local taxi drivers as Heartbreak Hotel, on account of a sign that he bought in Las Vegas and is nailed to his garage. Round the back of the house are three cars: his Mercedes, a 4×4,
and the three-wheeler used by Del Boy and Rodney in Only Fools and Horses (“It’s not the only one, though – I think there are about eight”). To get inside the house, one has to walk past a row of blue seats, ripped out of the old Manchester City ground, Maine Road, when the club moved to the City of Manchester Stadium. Then one goes through the garage door and into the biggest room in the house: the games room.
This is Hatton’s pride and joy, where he keeps his championship belts displayed in a glass cabinet, a running machine, a pool table emblazoned with Manchester City colours, and his comfiest seats. His big, flat-screen television is dedicated not only to sport but his favourite programmes: Only Fools and Horses, A Question of Sport, and Bullseye.
Every spare inch of wall in the house is taken up with memorabilia. There are signed pictures of Hatton and other boxing greats, a suit worn by Roy “Chubby” Brown, Bernard Manning’s underpants, a guitar signed by Hatton’s heroes Oasis, and a poster signed by Elvis. By the front door stands Cyril, a lifesize plastic butler bought from Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The kitchen is small and the dining room smaller. The sitting room looks unused. Upstairs are four bedrooms. That’s it – Hatton’s playboy mansion.
From the back garden he can see his parents’ house. “I was 25, 26, when I moved out of the boxroom at home,” he says. “I didn’t want to, but I thought it was probably time to move. I was going round to my Mum’s for tea until about six months ago, but Jennifer’s here now, so that’s all sorted.”
Hatton doesn’t care that the boxing writers give him little chance against Mayweather. Thomas Hauser, perhaps the most respected American writer, rates Hatton, but says he will lose fighting Mayweather at the heavier welterweight division. Adam Smith, a close friend of the Hattons, and Sky Sports’ boxing commentator, gives him a 2-out-of-10 shot. Many American writers have not been so kind.
On the day of the fight, those around him will need Hatton’s confidence. Ray and Carol will struggle to keep down breakfast, and then won’t eat anything for the rest of the day. “It is the most horrible feeling, and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody,” says Ray. “The winning or losing doesn’t come into it. You just want him to come out of there safe. Any parent who tells you anything different – anyone who says winning’s more important – needs help.”
Hatton will shadow-box his way through the jitters on December 8, as he always does. At 7pm, as the first bell approaches, he will walk to the ring with Graham, Kayes, his cuts man, Mick Williamson, and, depending on their availability, with either Wayne Rooney or David Beckham carrying his belts.
When Blue Moon is played, the lucky 3,900 who won the ballot to be in the arena for the big fight, the 10,000 watching on closed-circuit screens around the casino, and tens of thousands at home, will scream along to the words. Then Mayweather will arrive, and we will see whether Hatton can become the world’s best boxer, or simply remain its most amiable ambassador.