by Ricky Hatton
Even though I had boxed okay, my first two fights on HBO were little short of a disaster to be honest. Like Collazo, Urango wasn’t a vintage performance and HBO probably thought, ‘We’ve done our money here, you little git.’ Of course the performances were not perfect, but the Hatton bandwagon still gathered pace.
I was known more than ever for ballooning up in weight, and fighting less often gave me more opportunity to do that. I used to do it when I was the WBU champion. The most fights I’d had in a twelve month period was five when I was WBU champion and I’d lost two-and-half stone for each fight; I lost more than my body weight in that one year.
Making the weight was easier as I got older. Generally it’s harder to lose weight as time goes by, but I got more knowledgeable about what I was eating. Kerry was telling me what and when to eat and saying stuff like, ‘Instead of eating all that, cut it in half and have two meals. Have more meals on a regular basis and in the first few weeks in camp spend time on the treadmill dropping weight before you go to the gym.’ I made the weight more easily, even though I was still doing damage to my body – taking two-and-a-half stone off every time meant I was still taking short cuts, and sooner or later it would catch up to me.
I feel ashamed to admit it now. That said, when you look at the weight I put on you could tell I was dedicated to getting it off. Being in such bad condition and then looking and performing as I did – you need dedication to do that. You can eat fatty foods, you can drink beer and put weight on if you’re delivering papers, if you’re decorating a bedroom wall or stacking shelves in the supermarket. But you can’t do it when your body pays the bills. You can’t do anything that harms your body. You can’t do it for ten years, which is how long professional careers can be. The only way you get real wages is if you keep winning, and the only way you keep winning is giving yourself the best chance. It’s the hardest game in the world; there’s no need to make it even harder or do anything that will damage that engine. But I’d done it for that long and was getting away with it. I thought it would last forever. I honestly did.
After signing up to fight Castillo I was certain I was going to be able to get back on track, but after the tough nights with Maussa, Collazo and Urango there was no reason to think taking on the old Mexican warrior would be anything different. I had not lost in forty-two fights. Castillo was a brilliant lightweight who had twice given Floyd Mayweather all he could handle, and many felt he had actually deserved the decision in their first fight. He’d also defeated some top quality opponents like Julio Díaz, Juan Lazcano and the Cuban Joel Casamayor, and he moved up in weight to beat Ngoudjo in a WBC title eliminator. The fact that he was involved in one of the most thrilling fights of all time, against Diego Corrales, also appealed, as the common thought was that our styles would blend to provide an all-action fight.
I think people were expecting a war of Corrales–Castillo proportions; I said at the time, ‘I didn’t think it would be a tickling contest.’
Castillo lurked on the peripheries of some pound-for-pound lists but he had publicly outgrown the lightweight division when he failed the scales ahead of a rematch with Corrales. Diego, a true warrior from Vegas, still took the fight but was chinned in four rounds.
There was a real buzz about our fight at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas, the most for one of my fights since Kostya Tszyu. I had a couple of special guests walk to the ring with me as Mexican legend Marco Antonio Barrera and Manchester United and England striker Wayne Rooney carried my championship belts. I knew I’d need every bit of help I could get to beat Castillo, who I had the utmost respect for.
Marco and I had become great friends over the years. We had boxed on the same bill in Atlantic City in 1997 – we didn’t run into each other then, it was only years later when I was in Vegas that we met. He had been a world champion and finished Britain’s Richie Wenton in three rounds on the Naseem Hamed–Wayne McCullough bill. Marco was world class while I was just having my ninth fight; I had been to Las Vegas to watch some of his as a fan. As I walked through one of the casinos, Robert Diaz, the matchmaker for Golden Boy Promotions, came over to me and asked what I was doing in town, and I told him I was visiting to watch Marco fight. He said Marco, who was one of Golden Boy’s major names, would love to meet me and I was amazed. Marco ended up inviting me to his suite, where his kids, mum and grandparents were, and he introduced me to everyone and we struck up a really close friendship.
It might have been slightly problematic when I asked him to carry my belt in, and I thought hard about asking him. Castillo was his countryman, and perhaps I shouldn’t have put him in an awkward position, but I put him on the spot and asked him anyway. ‘I’d love to,’ he said.
‘Are you sure?’ I checked. ‘You won’t upset Castillo?’
He said, ‘Fuck Castillo, you’re my brother.’
I think Wayne was really pleased to be asked, too. I’d met him twelve months earlier, and I don’t mix with a lot of footballers but with Wayne what you see is what you get with him – he likes a laugh and a joke and we hit it off from the start. So I asked him to carry my belt in, told him that having someone like him carrying it in would inspire me, and he said he’d do it. Yes, he might have been a Manchester United player but he represented my city, and I was proud to have him in my corner.
I rented an apartment just off The Strip and I had fans in my room instead of putting up with the extreme air conditioning in the casino hotels and felt much better for it. I reckoned I was under pressure to perform after the Collazo and Urango fights and, as me and Castillo got stuck into each other from the opening bell, I did just that.
Early in the fight Billy actually told me off in the corner because I’d gone out there with the intention of boxing a bit, settling in to it and it was not long before I deviated from the game plan.
The first time I came together with Castillo and we exchanged, he leaned in to me and I got him, grabbed him and pushed him to the side, hit him with a body shot. He hit me with one and I pushed him back and was quite surprised at how weak he felt. Having fought a welterweight in Collazo and a muscle-bound freak like Urango, in comparison Castillo felt like a rag doll. Billy turned round and said, ‘What are you doing? You’re going crazy in there.’ I said, ‘Billy, you don’t know what I’m feeling. He’s ready for the taking.’
When you get there you can just feel it and you know. I could nudge him and he was on his heels, and I could throw him to the side and bang away with both hands, get into him and beat him to the head and body. When you feel that it’s not the time to jab, it’s the time to fucking jump on him.
That’s why me and Billy had such a great relationship. We would both get tapes of opponents, go away, come back to the gym and talk about it and, before I could say it, he was thinking it and, before he could say it, I was thinking it. It was boxing telepathy.
In my first exchange with Castillo, I thought, ‘You ain’t gonna last here.’ So I did what came naturally and jumped on him. Fighting at close-quarters is in many ways more artful than boxing at distance – the way you use angles, push their hands away to make the gaps, flick their gloves away to get your own shots off, step to the side, turn, pivot, tuck your elbows in. It’s poetry. It’s violent, but it’s poetry. Me and Castillo, with our foreheads pressed up against one another, trading body shots, with the timing and both of us going for it, was like two masters of infighting. Referee Joe Cortez just let us get on with it.
Castillo was getting me with body shots up the middle and I was getting them in the middle and round the side. He was catching me, not hurting me, but he was getting the shots off and scoring here and there. When I went for him with my punches he was pulling his elbows in to his sides, reducing the target area. The only way you can look after your body is with your arms and I was throwing the left hook to the body and he was getting his elbows down, so I realized I had to punch somewhere else first to open him up. If you hit someone in the head their elbows will come up and you can then swe
ep round the sides.
So I had to get him to the head, then to the body, but it was easier said than done because he’d studied me. I tried a few right hooks to the body, then a few down the middle into the pit of his stomach, but it was hard to get through, past his arms. Castillo was very clever but just then, after about two minutes of round four, I got him in the right position; I could see his elbow had finally left his body open and with my entire body weight I just touched him with a left hook. I heard him gasp for breath and he wheeled away in pain and onto one knee.
You could tell the way he went down – he scurried away spinning around – that it had got him. And I thought, ‘He’s not getting up here.’
I like to think that body shot would have knocked anyone out. It was the best body shot I’ve thrown. The minute it landed I thought, ‘Oooo, that’s the one. That’s the spot, that’s got him.’ And it did. If he hadn’t gone down from that I think I would have shit myself. I just got him in the perfect position and it hit the spot. Straight away, as soon as it landed, I knew he was gone.
No one had predicted an ending like that and it was just what I needed to breathe new life into my career. Again, although I was really pleased with the performance, there always seemed to be naysayers – there always have been. ‘Well, he struggled with Collazo. Yeah, Urango, no one had ever heard of him. Ah, Castillo’s past it.’ I thought, ‘What more can I do?’ Maybe Castillo had seen better years, maybe he hadn’t. But to knock out someone as tough as him with a body punch like I did was something else. You always get critics who say he would never have gone down from a body shot like that a few years ago, but why wouldn’t he? I broke four of his ribs with one punch – if I broke four of your ribs with one punch you’d probably go down.
It disappointed me that people seemed to say he was past his best only after I’d stopped him. When they saw his fights with Diego Corrales and his first fight with Floyd Mayweather, the fans and experts thought we would have a tear-up. People in boxing might have known I’d broken his ribs, and the excellent light-middleweight Winky Wright, who was ringside that night, can be seen applauding the shot as soon as it landed, but I don’t think I quite got the respect I deserved for that performance because people started asking questions about whether Castillo was over the hill. Not many people had said that beforehand. Regardless of that, however, it put me in a far better standing with my career, and needless to say the celebrations started almost instantly.
The day after Castillo, me and Jennifer were round the pool by the Mandalay Bay drinking, spending some quality time together, and I’d treated her to a cabana and some champagne. Then, during the day, I said, ‘I fancy going to see Tom Jones, love.’ We made our way through the casino, a little worse for wear, went to the front desk and tried to order some tickets for the show that night.
‘Certainly, Mr Hatton,’ they said. ‘How much is that?’ I asked. ‘They’re on the house.’ Wow, free tickets to a Tom Jones concert. ‘And your beer and wine will be paid for all night.’ By now the pair of us were steaming.
Tom Jones came on stage and said he’d like to give a mention to another Brit in the audience and he introduced me. The lights then beamed on me. ‘Ricky, are you going to join me for a drink afterwards?’ Tom said in front of everyone. Me and Jennifer were in a bad way by now.
Later on, Tom took us back into his changing room and he had his own bar there. His agent was there and we were having a drink, with different people coming in for pictures with him, and he asked us if we’d eaten and invited us out for a meal.
Now I can handle my beer but Jennifer can’t, and she was struggling. You know when you’re thinking, ‘We need to get out of here’ – that’s what I was thinking. Jennifer was talking the biggest load of shit I’d ever heard. At dinner, Tom turned to me and said, ‘Would you like a cognac, Ricky?’ My knees were knocking as it was – and I didn’t even know what cognac was. ‘Of course I do,’ I said, politely. Then Jennifer said to Tom, ‘What does your wife think of all the gallivanting that goes with show business?’
‘We’re going to have to go now, Tom,’ I interrupted, and we bailed out. He was laughing, though. He could see we were in a sorry state.
On a more serious note, people had been talking about the possibility of me fighting Floyd Mayweather long before Castillo, even though I hadn’t been over the moon with those fights against Collazo and Urango. I’d won both fights and added a welterweight title, so speculation was increasing. It helped that I had this incredible following – rising from about 4,000 for the Collazo fight in Boston, to about 6,000 in Las Vegas for the Urango fight and then for the Castillo fight around 10,000. It was just growing and growing.
After the Castillo fight, live on HBO, I was asked about Floyd Mayweather. American TV didn’t just like the fighter, they liked the story: ‘Who’s this slugger-scrapper with the massive following?’ Floyd had the bling and all that – we were made for each other because we were polar opposites. I jokingly enquired how many rounds Castillo had done with Floyd. They had boxed twenty-four rounds in their two fights, with Mayweather nicking the first by the skin of his teeth. I responded to the interviewer and said in front of millions of people, ‘There’s a reason all these fans have come over to watch me and that’s because I’m all about excitement. You saw more excitement in those four rounds than you’ve seen in Floyd’s whole fucking career.’
That did it. That one line tipped my popularity over the edge in the USA. I’m proud to say I became a big star in America and on HBO, but from where it started off with Collazo it was a bad beginning, with people thinking, ‘This kid’s not that good.’ Then, with three wins and that one line during a post-fight interview, well, that got the interest going all right – and it led to more than 25,000 fans going from England to Las Vegas.
CHAPTER 8
Mayweather
I first laid eyes on the ‘Pretty Boy’ in 2005 when he fought Arturo Gatti in Atlantic City.
It was only a couple of weeks after I’d beaten Kostya Tszyu, and for a while people had speculated that one day I might face Gatti – a crowd-pleasing puncher who was born in Canada but fought out of New Jersey. So I went to the fight and spent time with Arturo in his hotel beforehand. They were boxing for the WBC light-welterweight belt, and Floyd Mayweather had recently moved up from lightweight. He had won world titles at super-featherweight, lightweight and now, after demolishing Gatti, light-welterweight, killing the idea of me ever fighting Arturo.
Floyd was incredible that night, to be honest; he was something else against Gatti – he just made it look so easy. Gatti was a future Hall of Famer, but Floyd absolutely took him apart with a master-class of spiteful counterpunching. Floyd had something that I had not seen before. It was a mismatch, really, and it looked like Floyd could finish it at any time.
When I beat Tszyu, he was above Mayweather in the pound-for-pound rankings so I thought, ‘Okay, so Gatti was just a plodder. With my work rate, and if Kostya Tszyu couldn’t keep me off, how could Mayweather?’ So it was in my mind that we might fight one day. I knew it was possible. Mayweather called me out after the Gatti battering, saying we should fight at Madison Square Garden, and that I was a dirty fighter.
As a young gun, and having walked through everything Tszyu had given me at the time, nothing frightened me. I just thought, ‘All in good time, mate.’
I did not see Floyd Mayweather again until it came time to publicize our fight, set for 8 December 2007, nearly two years later. We did a five-city press tour through Los Angeles, Grand Rapids in Michigan – his hometown – New York, Manchester and London to publicize the event while filming a mini-series, Hatton Mayweather 24/7, for HBO, a show that documented the build-up to the fight to create intrigue and awareness for the pay-per-view.
In America, Floyd gave me such a drilling everywhere we went – he gave me so much stick. The Los Angeles press conference was at Disneyland. There was a red carpet and it was in the sunshine, and he was slagging me off, saying,
‘Come here, give me some of that face-to-face shit’, wanting to square up with me for the cameras and just talking down at me the whole time. I was simply hitting the usual soundbites, like ‘Yeah, it’ll be a good fight’ and all the rest of it. I tried not to sound bothered, but I came out of all of our meetings thinking, ‘You wanker.’
One night, I was out for a meal in a restaurant in Los Angeles with my dad, Kerry Kayes, Paul Speak and Billy Graham. We were all sat round the table when Floyd comes in and says, ‘Ah, Ricky, you’re having something to eat. I’ll get this.’ He started throwing $100 bills at us, shouting, ‘The meal’s on me.’ I thought, ‘You fucking idiot,’ until I saw the bills all over the table – ‘Hang on, there’s $600 there’ – so I stuffed it all in my pocket!
He wasn’t getting a bite from me but I didn’t like him at all. At Grand Rapids, we went to a place where he went to school and there were loads of kids there and every time I came out they booed, and every time Floyd came out they cheered. That was part of it. I just thought, ‘You wait until we get to Manchester. You’re going to fucking have it, you.’
At Manchester Town Hall I had home advantage for the first time. It was pissing down with rain but they put the big screens up and there were 5,000 fans there, inside and out, singing, ‘There’s only one Ricky Hatton.’
Floyd could never be accused of not playing up to a crowd and so almost predictably showed up in a Manchester United shirt. I stood behind the curtains with him waiting to go outside, with the biggest security guard I’d ever seen flanking him. Somebody launched a plastic bottle at the stage and the security guard dipped out of the way and the bottle hit Floyd right on the head – some security guard he was.
