War and PeaceMy Story

by Ricky Hatton

  But he was a very dangerous fighter, as I would find out.

  I believed I was going to destroy him and in the first round I legged it off my stool at a noisy, vibrant MEN to do just that. He was a southpaw, very sharp, could hit hard and was a counterpuncher. My style was made for him in many ways, with me charging forwards like I did. He’d feint, I’d lead and he would counterpunch. I made the worst start possible. He put me over with a right hand in the first round and it was the first time I had been put down in my career. It wasn’t a bad knockdown, I had been caught square with my feet together, but I should have known better and I was more embarrassed than anything else.

  Then he started talking to me in the ring. That was another first. ‘Did you like that? Did you? Nice shot, wasn’t it? Come on, Ricky.’ It infuriated me even more and, as we started round two, I thought, ‘Come on, fucking do it again.’ I was raging and dared him to try it – and sure enough I fell into the same trap. Instead of it being the wake-up call – ‘Hey up, slow down here, Rick. You got a little bit giddy, you jumped off your stool too quickly, just take your time and don’t get caught again’ – I went even faster. I played into his hands and then: bang. He cracked me with one in the second round, a short hook, and that one did shake me. My legs went and I had to smother him and survive the moment.

  I sulked back to my corner where Billy greeted me, saying, ‘You’re blowing it. What are you doing? You’re just swinging at everything and he’s waiting for you on the ropes. What are you doing? You’re not just going to get beat here, you’re going to fucking get knocked out unless you change your thinking. Don’t go in on straight lines, go in off the sides, use angles, feint. Let him lead first. You’re doing all of the leading and he’s doing all of the countering. Go in, feint and when he leads, catch him with a few shots.’

  That’s what I did and, for someone who was known as a slugger, I became a boxer. By the end I was beating Magee at his own game. I would sit on the ropes or in a corner and I’d feint, he’d throw a big shot and I would pepper him with three or four shots, lean away and in the end I won by two or three rounds. There were no doubts about the verdict – it was a unanimous decision – but he taught me a valuable lesson: not to bite, not to believe my own hype, and that was the first time I’d had to put up with that sort of bullshit. It would stand me in good stead for some of my later fights. Imagine if the Floyd Mayweather fight was the first time I’d had to deal with something like that?

  Someone else was running his mouth about me at the same time, too, and that was Sheffield’s Junior Witter, my leading domestic rival. If I had fought him I would have come out and done the same thing as I’d done with Magee, been careless and charged out of my corner, so it was important to have learned that lesson. For a long period it never seemed as though Witter’s name was far from mine; after the Thaxton fight we had it out during my ringside interview with Sky Sports. I think if Junior had a quiet moment now, and his team and his trainers, the Ingles – they don’t have to admit it to me – but I think it was a move that they would all regret.

  I’d just been in a Fight of the Year-type fight with Jon Thaxton, filled with blood and thunder – and there was still blood all over the place – and I was the victor, but even in defeat Jon was a winner, he’d given so much. It was that kind of fight. Then, all of a sudden, as I was being congratulated for winning the British title and sitting on the ring apron with a very generous and sporting Thaxton, Witter stuck his head in, acting like a dickhead. ‘I’ll take that belt off you, I’ll destroy you.’ It was one thing disrespecting me after doing twelve rounds and winning the Lonsdale Belt in a really hard fight when I was tired and knackered, but not only did I think they were disrespecting me but he was disrespecting his gym mate, Jon, and I was disappointed that his trainers had gone from Jon and on to supporting Junior in a finger-click. I know this is the hurt business – sometimes with business being the main word – but it was as if they were saying, ‘Right, Jon, you’ve had your turn. Junior, get in here. Start winding him up.’ I felt it was bad taste all round.

  I said to Frank Warren, who promoted both of us, ‘I’d love to fight that tosser,’ and he said we would leave it for a while, he’d build us up as stars and we would fight for more money further down the line.

  After the Thaxton fight, I went and boxed for the WBU title, had all of those defences and went to the MEN Arena and I was boxing in front of 10,000, 12,000, 14,000. Then I went to one of Matthew’s fights and Junior was on the bill, boxing Alan Temple; I had another fight coming up in the MEN and Junior was fighting a six-rounder. But he just didn’t have a following.

  I did an interview in the ring after he fought Temple and he was saying how he’d beat me. ‘How do you come to the conclusion you’d destroy me? Certainly not after that, mate,’ I said. We then got in the ring to do some pictures and I started taking the piss out of Junior a bit, mocking him by back-pedalling, shuffling with my feet and switch-hitting, giving it all that – which was quite fun.

  For me, Junior didn’t have the greatest style in the world and he hardly seemed to sell any tickets. I reckon five Frank Warrens couldn’t have promoted Junior Witter. How the hell can you build him? If it wasn’t for me, I don’t think you would have heard of him. That might be hypercritical when you think he won almost every title in boxing, WBC, European, Commonwealth and British, so he was no mug, but if it wasn’t for me – even after a career he can be proud of, and I’m giving him credit there – I still don’t think anyone would have heard of him. There was a period later on when we were world champions at the same time and we were on BBC Sports Personality of the Year together. There was a whole clutch of us who were world champions including, I think, Enzo Maccarinelli, David Haye, Joe Calzaghe and one or two others, and we would enter the studio from all four aisles of the venue. Junior said to me, before we came out from behind the screens, ‘One day . . .’

  ‘One day, what?’ I said.

  ‘You know.’

  I thought, ‘I’ve had enough of this dickhead, here.’ It started getting boring. As far as I was concerned he wasn’t fighting anyone, he had hardly beaten anyone of note. All he was doing was slagging me off repeatedly and I just felt I didn’t want to fight him. I certainly didn’t need to and I had contests against bigger names and better fighters than him. I didn’t need to prove anything to him, myself or anyone else so it just sort of fizzled out, really.

  I don’t regret it not happening, either. I’d like to have fought him at the time but as I go into promoting now I realize it is all about timing. With our styles it would have been a tough fight. He switches from left- to right-handed, likes to counterpunch and it would have been very, very difficult, but with how it all panned out in the end there would have been no gain for me. It wasn’t worth it. If the truth be known, when I got close to him in the ring I think I would have battered him. I believe with all my heart I would have destroyed him. But, it was all about timing. And Frank Warren was very good at that: timing it just right.

  Now, bygones are bygones and I can’t help but admire Junior for winning the titles he did, but he showed a lot of disrespect. In the end, I just became sarcastic in my responses in anything to do with Junior Witter. I said, ‘If he was fighting in my back garden, I’d draw the fucking curtains’ – stuff like that.

  It would have been massive, I know that. I’d like to think I was fighting some of the best contenders and earning my way up the rankings, but at the time if someone said, ‘Oh, he’s got the Ricky Hatton fight, what did he get that for?’ you would have been at a loss to explain it. Fights can be made now if you kick off at a press conference or if there’s bad blood, but that was never my philosophy. You had to earn your chances in my book. All of that time I wanted to fight him. I said to Frank Warren, ‘Can’t we put something in the contract so if I have the choice I can fight him?’ I can’t remember if we did or not, but I never fought Junior and I don’t feel as though I missed out on anything.

  C
HAPTER 5

  The WBU Reign

  Darkie Smith lost the plot. He flew into the ring and pushed the referee, Mickey Vann, yelling, ‘He fucking nutted him.’ That was not exactly the case but Darkie was clearly upset about how his fighter, his son Stephen, was doing in there.

  It was a chaotic night and one of the more shambolic episodes in British boxing history as it’s not every day a trainer leaps into the ring and puts his hands on an official.

  I thought I was on a bit of a hiding to nothing when I was booked to box Stephen Smith. He wasn’t big enough, he was a decent fighter at lightweight, a nice southpaw but not a big puncher – so, apart from good boxing ability and being a lefthander, he was really made for me. The style I would have trouble with was always going to be someone with the firepower to stop me in my tracks and keep me off. He’d only lost one of thirty-one fights but didn’t have those attributes. I was hurting him early in the first round and I think he knew he couldn’t hold me off. We threw right hands at the same time and mine landed first, and perfectly – just how you’d want it to. It went right through the target and he went down, got up and looked over to his dad in the corner.

  Let’s say this about Stephen’s expression: he wouldn’t have made a good poker player. I could see he knew he was up against it and realized the job in front of him was a big one. He saw the first round out but I was on top again in the second, bulling him around. I got him on the ropes, the crowd moved forward on their seats, and I did something I had always done through my career. I threw a shot but after it missed, I stayed close to him on the inside. Even if I missed I would sometimes stay in there, because if you stay on their chest they can’t get leverage into their punches – you don’t leave yourself open and you have your chin behind your shoulder. Anyway, as I tried to stay close to him I came back with my elbow which hit him right in the eye and he started bleeding. It wasn’t deliberate but the momentum carried me into him.

  He got up and said, ‘That was his fucking elbow’ to the referee.

  Then Darkie shot into the ring. ‘Hey, referee, he fucking nutted him.’ I knew what I had done, I had elbowed Stephen and it was an accident. But Darkie screamed, ‘He’s nutted him, he’s nutted him.’ As soon as someone enters the ring, let alone puts his hand on the official, he gets his fighter disqualified. Those are the rules in black and white. ‘He doesn’t even know what’s gone on,’ I thought. In my honest opinion, I thought he saw the opportunity to get his son out of there but maybe he really did think I had nutted his son and was so furious he jumped in. Whatever the reality, I know that’s not the way Stevie would have liked the fight to have finished, but by getting the contest halted – deliberately or not – I think Darkie had saved his son from getting a longer beating.

  I never saw Darkie again but I’ve seen Stephen once in a while, and one time I saw him in a gym and he wanted me to sign some gloves for his lad, who was apparently a big fan of mine. I’d come out on top against his dad but his son still wanted me to sign them. Stephen is a nice guy.

  It was not a particularly satisfactory evening and probably one of the few nights where my fans didn’t go home happy. Barely thirty seconds had passed in round two before Darkie flipped, but I’d done all I could do and the crowd at the MEN apparently understood that – it seemed I could do little wrong in their eyes.

  I think another of the reasons I got the fanbase I did was because I boxed a lot of domestic fighters. British boxing fans have always enjoyed their big British title nights. Sure, I didn’t fight Witter but I boxed Rowland, Thaxton, Magee and Stephen Smith and that helped, as those fighters had their own followings. It’s not like some young boxers who have to fight a series of Mexican road-sweepers or Latvian liabilities.

  By now me and Billy had started working with Kerry Kayes, who was overseeing my strength and conditioning. He paid close attention to what I was and wasn’t eating and drinking in training camp. He was a former British bodybuilding champion and owned both the Betta Bodies gym in Denton and the CNP nutritional empire, and, after Billy’s old gym closed, and we’d spent some time at my old amateur club training for fights, we moved into a boxing gym that you could get to by walking through the Betta Bodies.

  Kerry immediately made a massive difference to me. Boxing has come a long way in a short space of time; it was not long ago that things were like they were in the Rocky movies, with fighters chasing chickens around a coup and drinking raw eggs. Those days are gone but for a long time boxing was slow to embrace sports science; nowadays everyone has a strength trainer or nutritionist because it’s so important.

  My fighting would be in close quarters; I was up close to my opponent and there would be a lot of pushing, shoving, mauling, stepping to the side and being explosive – with explosive movements – and I used every part of my body to punch. If I threw a punch everything went behind it; if I threw a left hook my shoulder went behind it, my head, my arse, my hips . . . and that was down to Kerry, not just the nutrition and making weight but the strength work and weight-training we were doing. I used to lift very, very heavy weights. People used to say: ‘Do light weights with lots of repetitions’, but I used to do heavy weights and not too many reps so when I was punching correctly, and Billy showed me how to punch with leverage, the weight went on the end of my punch. It was a lovely balance of adding power to my technique.

  Kerry enjoyed a joke, too – it was that type of gym. He likes to tell people how one day he put a wad of Vaseline in my floppy hat. I constantly needed my wits about me, it was a nuthouse – you had to be more careful about what people would do to you outside of the ring than inside it. Every time you turned your back you had to look over your shoulder. We were like a family in the gym back then, we all used to go on holiday to Tenerife with each other and we were incredibly close-knit. Any time one of us fought we were all in it together. That gym banter is one of the things pros miss when they are faced with retirement.

  Despite the pranks, Kerry is a very intelligent person. Some strength and conditioning coaches and nutritionists try to take over in camp but what they have to realize is their role is second fiddle to the boxing. Some people think their job is more important than it actually is in boxing today, but the most important thing is the boxer, and everything Kerry did with me was on Billy’s say-so. ‘What you do in the boxing gym is the priority and I will work to support that,’ Kerry said, and he’d ask Billy, ‘What do you need from Ricky in the boxing gym?’ Billy would tell him what he needed and Kerry would then tailor the weights around the boxing.

  It doesn’t matter how much you lift or bench press because it’s all got to be geared around the boxing and that’s why we all worked so well together. Kerry got my body and condition right for boxing – which is what we were all there to do. You wouldn’t want to be put through the ringer with circuit training and then arrive in the boxing gym and be unable to train properly. What would be the point if you’re too fucked and can’t hold your arms up as you’ve been doing too many weights?

  I was a bit sceptical about Kerry’s idea of nutrition at first, though. He knows I was, too, and I took some persuading. Traditionally, when you’re making weight boxers don’t want to drink water for some reason, and Kerry used to have me drinking masses and masses of water. He also used to say I had to eat five meals a day and I said, ‘How the fuck is that going to work? How am I going to drop three stone eating five times a day?’ I needed convincing because when you’re making weight it’s scary to hear someone say you have to put food in your mouth and drink loads of water. I had trained myself to think, ‘Well, I can’t eat that and I can’t drink that.’

  In that respect it took me a while to get my confidence in Kerry but, once I did, there was no turning back. He certainly made me a believer and it got to the stage where, after weeks with hardly sticking my head through the gym door, I would bowl into training on my first day back and ask Kerry to take a picture of me then and one near the end of camp so we could compare before and after sho
ts.

  Back then I had three wardrobes. I had clothes with a twenty-eight-inch waist for when I was in shape, thirty-one inches for when I was in training camp, about five or six weeks out and, when I was not training, there was the thirty-six-inch-waist stuff. What I was able to do to my body, and the condition I could get it in from where it was to what it became, was really impressive. Even though I had a real lack of willpower when I left the gym, when I went back and started that twelve-week training camp I had the discipline that would match or exceed any professional fighter. I am a master of it, armed with good nutritional advice and a willpower that you cannot match anywhere, in any sport. It was feast or famine. People used to see me in the ring – having lost all that weight – and almost shake their heads in disbelief thinking, ‘How in fucking hell has he lost all that weight? How is he looking so good and how is he able to perform like that?’ It was freaky stuff.

  Two nights before training camp begins the phone rings. It’s Billy. ‘Don’t forget, back in the gym on Monday.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Billy, I will be there. I’m out tonight, recovering tomorrow and then I’m in.’ Billy and Kerry are waiting there wondering what they will see when I come through the door. They shake their heads the minute I wobble in. ‘Oh Jesus, he’s given us a mountain to climb here again,’ they say and smile.