It was once via Hatton that they had a way in; someone to follow and something easy to understand. It wasn’t just them, either. Hatton, for us all, represented a time when British boxing was truly thriving and when boxers were built at home and not shipped off to the Middle East to mitigate the financial risk of promoters in the UK. Self-made, self-funded, and self-aware, Hatton was the last great ticket-seller, the last one-city man, and the last cult hero of British boxing. He had fans, actual fans, and these fans would follow him wherever he went. They were not big-event fans, as we see today, but Ricky Hatton fans. Tens of thousands of them in Manchester; the same amount in Las Vegas. Even if they didn’t know him personally, they felt they did. At the very least they connected with him. At the very least they watched him.
