Ricky Hatton used to look like a ghost-faced urchin as he slipped into an old hat factory on the edge of Stockport. It was easy then to imagine him in a past life, stealing through Victorian Manchester as a gaunt fingersmith, his nimble hands relieving rich men of their excessive wealth. But the gory marks on his face always brought us back to the jolting present and his bruising reality as a young and aspiring boxer.<\/p>\n
In 2003, when I interviewed him for the first of many times in the atmospheric setting of that converted factory turned into a boxing gym, Hatton was 24 years old. The troubles of the future lay deep in the unknown because everything Hatton did then burned with an immediacy and urgency. He didn\u2019t care that his gaunt and sickly face was mottled with dark blue bruises and crimson nicks which had yet to scab over and start to heal. \u201cBasic wear and tear,\u201d he said with a little grin, \u201cand my skin\u2019s abnormal. When I go out into the sun, no matter how long I spend outside, I stay deathly pale. I change colour in the ring. I mark up and I cut.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hatton also changed his character between the ropes. The friendly young man turned into the ferocious \u201cHitman\u201d<\/a>, as he was nicknamed, while he tore into sparring partners or hammered home withering punches into a body protector which could not stop his trainer, Billy Graham, telling me how it felt like he was being \u201cmurdered\u201d by Hatton.<\/p>\n \u201cYou hold your breath as you get knocked back,\u201d Graham said as he described the full force of being hit by Hatton. \u201cYou try to move away. He nails you with another and another. You\u2019re still holding your breath. It\u2019s like having your head held under water.\u201d<\/p>\n As he pummelled his trainer, or crumpled tough old bruisers brought in for sparring, Hatton let slip eerie little cries and shrieks. Seeing Hatton hit so hard gave me my most vivid insight into how seriously dangerous yet dramatically thrilling boxing was in stark closeup.<\/p>\n After all the decades of hanging around gyms, watching fighters at work, only the memories of Mike Tyson at his most destructive in sparring can rival the vivid images I carry of the young Ricky Hatton. He was utterly lost in boxing \u2013 and he soon turned it into a spectacle which won him a vast and roaring army of fans.<\/p>\n British boxing seemed a little lost then, as it does now, drifting between eras. The great nights of the 1990s had been elevated by the simmering rivalries between Michael Watson, Chris Eubank Sr and Nigel Benn. Boxing<\/a> in that decade had also been shaped by the crossover appeal of fighters as complicated and contrasting as Frank Bruno and Naseem Hamed.<\/p>\n Tens of thousands of fans followed Ricky Hatton to Las Vegas for his fight in 2007 against Floyd Mayweather Jr. Photograph: Andrew Couldridge\/Action Images\/Reuters<\/p>\n But they were all lost or faded when Hatton stepped out of the shadows in a new century and instilled fresh vigour into the battered old fight business. He brought with him tens of thousands of new fans who followed him with rising fervour \u2013 partly because he was so exciting to watch<\/a> in the ring and partly because it seemed as if he really was just one of them, a seemingly ordinary working-class kid who liked to drink, swear, watch football and have a laugh.<\/p>\n Six years later, when we were together in Las Vegas while he prepared for his penultimate fight, which resulted in him being knocked out chillingly by Manny Pacquiao in 2009<\/a>, Hatton spoke earnestly of how much it mattered to him that he was so loved. \u201cThey see me as an ordinary bloke,\u201d he said of his fans, \u201cand their mate.\u201d<\/p>\n Tens of thousands of his supporters arrived in Vegas that week, undeterred by the fact that Hatton had been knocked out two years earlier in that same gaudy city by Floyd Mayweather Jr<\/a>, and they kicked up an almighty racket for the fighter they regarded as one of their own.<\/p>\n But, in his fleeting prime, Hatton was extraordinary. In the early summer of June 2005 he came through fire to outfight and ultimately overwhelm the brilliant Kostya Tszyu<\/a> at a rocking and near hysterical MEN Arena in Manchester. It remains one of the greatest nights in the history of British boxing \u2013 and the magnificent peak of Hatton\u2019s tumultuous career. Victory brought him even more adoration, money and the demons of fame.<\/p>\n As hard as he tried to stress his normality, by buying drinks for blurring strangers in heaving pubs as he matched them pint for pint, Hatton could feel himself slipping away. Years of hard drinking between fights also diluted his ability to maintain his once voracious work rate. His vulnerability outside the ring soon became evident in that unforgiving space between the ropes. Defeat to Mayweather and Pacquiao crushed him.<\/p>\n