by Ricky Hatton
The Thaxton fight was a hundred miles an hour, fought at a searing pace, but I showed boxing ability, heart, how to tough it out and that I had a sound chin. Afterwards people weren’t just saying I could go twelve rounds, they were talking about the engine I had because it was fought at such a terrific pace. If there was ever a sign that you’ve got what it takes to go all the way, then perhaps winning a contest like that said more than anyone ever could. People realized that if I carried on developing, I had all of the attributes to maybe get to a high level and achieve what past winners of the British title had. And although it was a very physical fight, there was a misconception that whenever I went into the ring there would be a war, and I reckon that is probably how people thought I sparred and what I prepared for. But it wasn’t.
With Billy, training was always very physical but sparring was often tactical. It wasn’t about having wars. A lot of people do touch sparring, and technique sparring, and I’m not a fan of that either. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe in real battles in the gym, just like Billy doesn’t, but it’s got to be realistic: you’ve got to learn to get cracked on the chin, you’ve got to learn to get hurt in the breadbasket and in the ribs, you’ve got to get your body hardened to what happens in the ring. But if you go to war day after day, and your body is taking a pounding in the gym, it’s not going to benefit you in the fight. It’s got to be realistic without putting miles on the clock; although there were times it could get out of hand.
There was a Belgian kid who I ended up knocking out in sparring. He came out in the first round and went for me – bang, bang, bang, bang. I was covering up, thinking, ‘Fucking hell, he’s gonna fucking kill me here.’ Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket. We had a right ding-dong of a spar for about three rounds. It was like Tommy Hearns against Marvin Hagler. Billy was shouting, ‘Whoa, whoa!’ and I thought I had to open up on the lad because of the punches he was throwing. I got him on the ropes, threw a right hand that hit him on the chin and knocked him out on the floor. I felt sorry for him after but he was a good spar.
There was another time when emotions ran high. I was sparring with Matthew; we didn’t just play football and do almost everything together, we also sparred with each other – he had a very good, tidy defence. We never had many arguments but I remember one. We were sparring as professionals – when I was a champion and Matthew was an up-and-coming professional – and when I got him on the ropes he turned his back on me. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and Billy said, ‘What’s going on here?’
‘He’s turning his back, Bill,’ I replied. Matthew said, ‘No, no I’m not.’
I shot back: ‘You’re turning your back, you dickhead.’ We had a row in the middle of the spar. ‘You can’t turn your back, you’ve got to face me.’ He kept doing it so I hit him and I said, ‘Do that one more time and I’ll hit you in the kidneys.’
He did it again, so I hit him in the kidneys. He tore his gloves off and chased me around the gym trying to knock me out – Billy ended up having to pull us apart. We still sparred over the years; it was just one of those things that day. In a hard environment like that, when you have a fight coming up (as we often both did back then), it can get heated and charged.
Generally speaking, Billy and I would do twelve rounds of work in the gym every day, so we were getting the rounds in, but sometimes all we’d do is eight rounds of sparring in a session for a title fight. We’d just make up the twelve rounds by doing four on the bodybelt, or if it had been six rounds of sparring, then six on the bodybelt. I always got twelve rounds out. If my spars had been a bit physical, more frantic than Billy would have liked, he’d give me the next day off sparring and we’d work on the bodybelt and the pads so we still did the twelve.
Canada’s Tony Pep had visited Britain before and beaten a few of our lads as the Commonwealth champion. He had not lost since he had boxed a talented American called Floyd Mayweather Jr (Mayweather had outpointed him over ten rounds in Atlantic City three years earlier), winning three times and drawing once. We met at the Wembley Conference Centre in London for the vacant WBU light-welterweight title – a tip-of-the-iceberg belt on the world scene, but it was a significant step up for me from most of the lads I’d fought.
Pep was a lanky operator who knew his way around the ring. I was a rookie, had won my twenty-two previous fights, felt unstoppable, and with thirty seconds left in round four I had a new title to my name.
We’d fought for the vacant belt because the previous champion, West Ham’s Jason Rowland, had to relinquish the title. Rowland, a battle-hardened thirty-two-year-old, ten years older than me, bred Staffordshire bull terriers and when two of his dogs were having a scrap, he tried to break them up and ended up losing the top of one of his fingers. They couldn’t save it and the time he spent out of the ring caused him to lose his title – he vacated it so I could fight Tony Pep. There was one condition: Jason had to be my first defence, and 5,000 fans packed into the Velodrome in Manchester for this big domestic fight.
I never had any bad blood with Jason. He was a really nice guy, a former WBU champion and he won the title on the same bill when I fought Thaxton. Jason’s fight with Thaxton was stopped on cuts, but pretty much from the start I was on top against him, hurting Jason early, and it was exciting. I was using my left hooks and body shots, and he was counted out as he tried to get up from the second knockdown in round four.
It doesn’t matter what title you win – whether it’s a WBU title, an Inter-Continental title or a major world title – there is always a little bit inside you that feels that you haven’t won it properly until you beat the fella who held it initially; by beating Jason I felt like it was my property now.
By the time I faced the man they called the ‘Macho Midget’, John Bailey, the crowds had begun to swell and there must have been 6,000 or 7,000 fans in the MEN Arena. He came over from West Virginia and was as tough as they come, not really a big name but he was an American, so there was a chance it could help break me into the market in the USA on a small scale.
I knocked him down four times with a variety of shots, a left to the body, a right to the body, a head shot and so on. That was really the start of the MEN adventure for me and after that you could see with each fight, in my hometown in the same venue, the crowds growing from 7,000 to 10,000, then 12,000, then 14,000 and before you knew it the place was sold out.
Just six weeks later I was back there. I’m not going to lie, veteran American Freddie Pendleton had seen better days when we met in the ring (he’d turned pro in 1982 but had fought some big guns, like Félix Trinidad and Vince Phillips) but – having said that – I was the novice coming up, so it was still a dangerous assignment. One thing you don’t lose is your punch; another thing a fighter knows after being around the block is how to look after themselves. They can quieten a crowd by staying safe, working for the last thirty seconds of each round, just trying to nick it on the scorecards, and they can capitalize on the slightest mistakes younger, inexperienced fighters need to make in the ring in order to learn from them. Boxers like Pendleton have seen every inch of the canvas, and so to get to him as quickly as I did, and find his body and start hurting him, showed real progress. If you’re the wrong side of the age barrier, which he was, you don’t get found out in two rounds. For me to find the right shots that early and do the damage I did against someone so experienced meant it was a big, big fight for me. I was looking for the body, looking, looking and looking. When the chance came I threw and the shot nearly missed but it actually sickened him. It did some real damage because he rolled over about three times and made it look theatrical. Non-boxing fans might have gone, ‘Hey, what’s all that about?’ But if you know your boxing, you’d have gone, ‘Ouch. That’s going to hurt.’ Freddie never fought again.
It was not the fact I had defeated him, because he was beatable to me, so much as the manner in which I did it. You might get to an ageing fighter around the sixth, seventh, eighth or ninth, but not in two roun
ds. Even if he had seen better days, at the age of thirty-eight, you’d think he’d know enough to get through those early sessions.
The Pendleton fight was my first on ShoBox, a programme on the American network Showtime that showed fighters coming up. I started to get introduced to the fans in the USA. The higher you go up in levels, the more noticed you get – and the more advanced warning your opponents get. It’s not like you’re fighting a six-rounder, when you find out who you’re fighting the week before; you get in there and just have to get on with it, deal with who you’re facing; when you get to championship level you have plenty of weeks in advance to study your opponent. That meant fighters could study me, too; see I worked the body, that I had a good left downstairs, and that I liked to change angles. I’m sure they were doing their homework on me. The thing was – I was still able to get my punches in.
I had started to get a fanbase outside my hometown, too, and it was no longer just a case of flogging tickets to my mates. I was venturing further afield and it didn’t matter if you were from Manchester, Birmingham, London or wherever, people were saying, ‘I want to go and see this Ricky Hatton. The body puncher. He’s exciting.’ I always made a point of spending time with fans and even then, as British and WBU champion, I was doing sportsmen’s dinners, talking about my career and doing a stand-up comedy routine. It is something you normally do when you retire, when you talk about your achievements, so I was really the only active fighter doing it while I was still boxing. I remember, later on at one of the smaller venues, some people saying, ‘What are you doing coming here, you? You’re a world champion. You’re obviously well paid for fighting.’ But I just liked going out, meeting the fans and talking about my career; I think it stood me in good stead with the public functions I took part in later on.
I enjoyed it and I was often joined on the road by Paul Speak. At Billy’s old gym, when I was an amateur, Paul, a local police officer, would watch the pros at work. He’d been stabbed during the Toxteth riots and was always popping in, as Salford was his patch. One day, when I was in the World Juniors in Cuba, he asked where I was and was apparently impressed when he was told I was in Cuba. When I came back, we started talking more regularly and became friends. He’s been at almost every fight of mine since; after he retired from the police, he started working for me as my agent. He’s been in the camp a long time and had to put up with all sorts from me. We’ve been together in one way or another for more than fifteen years.
He never got involved with the boxing, but there’s certain people you need to have around you and he became one for me. On fight week you need to go here, be there, you’ve got to have a press conference, pick this and that up and Speaky has been the one who has taken the weight off my shoulders when anything needed doing, and we’ve got closer and closer over the years. He is probably not well liked in some quarters, only because on the week of the fight if I needed to concentrate I would send him instead of doing it myself, so he’s the one that cops for it, whatever I do. If I’m training, sparring, running and something came up or I had to ring someone I didn’t always have the time to do it. So Paul did and he was seen as the bad guy, which he wasn’t; he’s become a very close friend and there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for me. He’s one of life’s nice guys, and he’s not often seen in that light but he always will be in my eyes.
Generally I tried my after-dinner and stand-up material and jokes on my mates, but I had learned a lot of them from people in the pub when I was younger. I used to walk back from school at about half past three and all the regulars would be in the pub; I’d have a game of darts or a game of pool with them – in the pubs you meet so many characters who were always telling stories and jokes, and I often think that’s where I got my sense of humour. There are quite a few jokes that have stayed with me, and a few that are boxing related, too. I’ve always been a Mike Tyson fan, and later – after we’d boxed on the same bill in Manchester – he would call me to congratulate me on some of my biggest wins. And I’d say to the crowd during my after-dinners, ‘Imagine coming home to find Tyson, the Baddest Man on the Planet, in bed with your missus. You’d fucking tuck him in, wouldn’t you? Then you’d apologize as you quietly left the room.’
I was never embarrassed. I loved the hecklers and I always had a few comebacks at the ready, because I have been on the receiving end. ‘If I wanted to listen to an arsehole, I’d fart,’ I’d reply. Or, ‘There you go, keep shouting so a doorman can see where you’re sat.’
One night, a woman was giving me grief from the back of the venue and so I tried to get her to make a fool of herself. ‘There are some really sexy ladies in here tonight,’ I said.
Sure enough, she bellowed, ‘Wahay.’
‘Not you, love,’ I said dryly.
The crowd erupted and I didn’t hear from her again.
One day, me and Paul were driving to a show where I was going to do my after-dinner speaking and, before we got to the venue, I said, ‘Here, Paul, just pull in to this pub so I can have a pee.’ So I popped in. Paul was in the car and waited patiently. A couple of minutes turned to five. Perhaps he thought I needed something a bit more serious than a pee and five minutes turned to ten. When ten turned into twenty minutes and then thirty, Paul became concerned and came in after me.
There I was, at the bar, not drinking but cracking jokes and talking about my fights with two dozen locals. That has happened a couple of times over the years, and, while other people might have come and gone, Paul’s been brilliant for me – he’s given me stability and helped me in every way he can.
When I fought Australia’s Justin Rowsell, Boxing News thought it was the first time the Wembley Conference Centre had been full for boxing since Lloyd Honeyghan had fought there about ten years earlier. Rowsell was a good amateur and an okay fighter; some said he should have got his opportunity at a title sooner than he actually did. And although they didn’t say it at the time, when he did get it he was probably slightly past his best. Maybe I’m doing myself a disservice by saying that, because he was experienced and he was good, but I found him from the opening bell, just like I did Pendleton. A left hook knocked Rowsell out of the ring near the end of the first and my performance was again exciting. I was switching angles and mixing up my attack. I stopped him early in the second round after putting him down again.
What started happening around that time was, whenever I put an opponent up against the ropes, I could hear the crowd take a sharp intake of breath, producing a quiet roar. It’s akin to Lionel Messi getting the ball for Barcelona and how it was at Maine Road all those years ago when I was on the terraces and Georgi Kinkladze picked up the ball and went on one of his mazy runs. There was an air of anticipation. ‘Ohhhh,’ the crowd’d say. The minute I started slipping and my opponents’ backs would touch the ropes, the fans buzzed as they waited for me to work the body. I was firing in these rib-benders and getting so much leverage into each shot, and that’s something I noticed growing more and more each fight. It was as if people were saying, ‘Wait until he gets this fucker on the ropes.’ It was my calling card, almost like coining a catchphrase.
I’d stopped five consecutive opponents since the Thaxton bloodbath and I could hear people whispering that they wanted me to face sterner opposition, and tough Russian Mikhail Krivolapov was a live opponent. He was highly ranked in the world ratings and particularly by the WBC. You will always get critics in whatever sport you take part in as you get successful – it’s just the way it is. Some had said Pep was a blown-up lightweight, that Pendleton was over the hill . . . they could always say something, but that didn’t happen this time. Krivolapov was a world-class fighter, young in age and with the same ambition as me, so you couldn’t fault him.
He was very good and caused me a fair few problems. I hit him and hurt him pretty much from the start, but he was game, sucked it up and fought through it. A couple of times I caught him cleanly and he would come firing back. Sometimes I would hit someone and I could tell how much the s
hot had taken out of them. If I’d caught them in the head, I knew when they would be foggy and how unclear they would be. When I caught them downstairs I could tell how long it might be before they got their breath back. With Krivolapov, he was digging deep and trying to fight back the whole way through, giving everything he had. He was a good, skilful fighter; not a murderous puncher but when I stopped him in nine rounds in my first fight of 2002 he was number four or five with the WBC.
On that same bill, Matthew outpointed Paul Denton – the man who had cut me early in my career – in a six-rounder to win his tenth fight.
Now I was ranked by several of the world’s governing bodies, but in February 2002 the best light-welterweight in the world, Australia’s Kostya Tszyu, said he had no interest in fighting me. When you’re number one in the division you’re not thinking about people who are a year or two away from fighting you, the young guns coming up – you look higher up the food chain. He was looking towards bigger fights and paydays, unification contests – he probably had no desire to fight the eighth- or ninth-ranked fighter. It was not a fear factor; Tszyu had no reason to fear me. That is just boxing and how it’s structured; it was still a proving ground for me, even though I thought I was ready for Tszyu back then and was chomping at the bit to get at him.
There were still things I needed to experience and go through before I was ready for the very best, and a valuable lesson was taught to me by Irishman Eamonn Magee. I can safely say I didn’t like him one bit and it was the first time I experienced ‘banter’ and mind games in my career, as he tried to get under my skin and wind me up. I’m not scared to admit I fell for it hook, line and sinker. I’d seen him fight Shea Neary – his best win – and it was nip and tuck. He’d also stunk the place out once or twice since, and watching the tapes, I thought, ‘Who is this cocky shit? I don’t see anything to be fucking scared of here.’ To me he was very slow, sometimes his work rate was not very good and he didn’t exactly make you sit on the edge of your seat. But he was full of it: ‘You’re just a kid!’ he shouted. ‘I’m going to take you to school. You’ve not fought a man like me. I’ve had tougher sparring partners than you,’ and it was the way he said it, the way he talked, in that real nasty, spiteful way.
