Hiya,
I am unfortunately going to be away in Helsinki for the Hatton fight. Does anyone know if there are any channels I can pick it up on whilst out there? It is PPV here right? So I probably wont get it in a sports bar.
Cheers
Hatton v Maussa on European channels?
-
MightyWarrior
- Heavyweight
- Posts: 13284
- Joined: 23 Jan 2003, 14:01
Call Fight Academy - they'll likely be trying to sell TV rights round Europe to help pay the bills.
It's a busy night though - there's also the big bill in Germany on ZDF, plus Johnny Nelson & the Welsh crew in Rome on RAI 2.
Good Hatton interview here -
The Big Interview: Ricky Hatton ( timesonline.co.uk )
The Mancunian world champion is as tough as any in his trade but also an eloquent young man with a sense of perspective, finds David Walsh
It’s an old converted factory in Denton, east of Manchester. The staircase is wooden and beaten-up. Four flights up is an old gymnasium, beyond it the boxing gym. It has a ring, punch bags suspended from the ceiling, posters on the walls, gloves everywhere, drops of perspiration glistening on the dirty brown wooden floor.
There is a small changing room, an office sign that says “Billy ‘The Preacher’ Graham”, and there are people everywhere. Ricky Hatton, arguably rated the world’s best light-welterweight, pounds a bag; his brother Matt shadow- boxes in the ring; another fighter, Matt Macklin, does some exercises; and the gym’s only female pro, Jenny Dowell, works on her combinations.
Many people stand by the side, some sit by the ring, standing no more than a couple of feet away from the fighters as they work. Graham, the trainer, is in his office, watching a video of Macklin’s recent victory over an American, Anthony Little, in Philadelphia. “Matt, you looked so relaxed in Philadelphia,” he will say to Macklin when they talk later.
This morning is busy because Matt Hatton’s girlfriend, Gemma Coyne, has turned up with 13 teenagers from Salford. Gemma works for Salford city council. The boys are all at risk of exclusion from three comprehensive schools in the area, and because they have recently improved their attendance records, their reward is a day watching Ricky Hatton train.
They sit and watch, have a little fun but are never a nuisance. They gather around the punchbag as Hatton works it, each blow accompanied by a guttural grunt. He knows where they come from: the council estates, the tough backgrounds, the hard- case families, the bad-luck stories, the attitudes that cause trouble. They watch him spend his aggression on a leather bag, and because they know where he has come from, they look up to him.
Gary Weir is the smallest of the 13, a sharp-looking 14-year-old with a cheeky smile. He sits by the corner of the ring, his hands worming their way into two unlaced gloves. “Hey, Ricky,” he says during the fighter’s water break. “How did City get on last Saturday?” This is not a question but a jibe. Manchester City lost to Fulham. The kid wants to get under Hatton’s skin and to challenge the champion.
Hatton lets it go at first, but the kid is not one to back off. The talk continues, and then during one of the subsequent water breaks the fighter draws a slug from a water bottle, swishes it round his mouth, fixes the kid with a grin and lets him have it, right between the eyes. Instinctively the kid jumps to his feet, water dripping from his face, and puts up his gloved fists. As if he meant to sort out Ricky Hatton. And the champion, with the same instincts, puts up his fists and everybody in the gym laughs. Hatton paws him gently on the side of the face.
The kid sits down quickly, his honour saved by his smiling face.
THIS is Ricky Hatton’s world: a boxing gym, working-class Manchester, playing for the pub darts team, loving Man City, remembering the kids from the wrong side of the tracks. “A lot of fighters shut themselves away. I’m not like that,” he says. “As long as they’re not getting in the road of my training, anybody who wants can come to the gym, especially those from my local area. I like to think I’ve done the area proud, and people shouldn’t be excluded, especially kids.”
Hatton is 27 and has fought 39 times as a professional, winning every fight, with 29 knockouts. He holds two versions of the light-welterweight world title, the IBF and the WBU, and fights the Colombian Carlos Maussa in Sheffield on Saturday week for the WBA title. After that he wants Floyd Mayweather, the WBC champion, then Miguel Cotto, who holds the WBO title. Although he must first deal with Maussa, victory over Mayweather would establish Hatton as the world’s greatest light-welterweight.
He is a good fighter, Ricky Hatton, but it is character as much as skill that has made him one of the most loved of all British boxers. Manchester City’s manager, Stuart Pearce, and his coaching staff turned up unannounced at his gym last week to watch him work out. Steven Gerrard, Michael Owen, John Terry and Shaun Wright-Phillips are among the footballers to have watched him fight.
The chef Gordon Ramsay, the comedian Roy “Chubby” Brown and the darts world champion Phil Taylor are also fans. Ramsay told Hatton he was welcome any time to a meal on the house at his place in London. Brown sent him a suit he had worn on stage, because they have seen something in Hatton that transcends talent and courage, something that reminds us of human nature’s capacity to surprise.
How to explain this? For Hatton, you may imagine, is just another prizefighter lucky enough to have escaped the council estate. In fact he is so much more. He has come from the heart of working-class England and represented his community with intelligence, humour and decency. Success, fame and wealth have not turned his head, nor have they diluted the straightforwardness that has always been his way.
We talk about his love for Manchester City, the club for which his father and grandfather both played and which he has supported since he was a kid. He too might have been a footballer — he was on City’s books as a teenager — but he was better at boxing. “A lot of people like watching football, but I’m a die-hard. When City get beat on a Saturday, that’s my weekend ruined,” he says.
“When we play United, I’m just as much up for that as for my fights. I know United fans support me and I am a Mancunian, very proud of my town, but when United get beat, I still have a little snigger to myself. I’m a City fan. I have my own box at City now, I bought my own box, but I’m not one that sits there quietly and watches the match, I’m off my seat, cursing the players. As much as I love my team, I will be effin’ and jeffin’ all the way through the game.
“I go to as many away games as possible. It’s nice at away games because I stand in the queue, buy a ticket and then sit with the rest of the City fans. People find it strange, you know. ‘What are you doing here, Ricky?’ I will be in the queue for a pie and Bovril at half-time and fellows will be going, “Is it, no it can’t be, what would he be doing here?’ But if they knew me personally, they would know I don’t see myself as any different to them.
“My best mates now are the guys who were my best mates on our council estate in Hattersley 20 years ago. I still drink at the New Inn pub on the estate, and when I celebrate winning a fight, it’s in my local pub with my old people.”
HATTERSLEY is a small suburb about eight miles east of Manchester. It was here that Hatton grew up, the older of two sports-loving boys. He played football but longed to be a kick-boxer, a dream that perished on the rock of short and stumpy legs. Roy Williams, his kick-boxing coach, told him to try boxing, and he started at the boxing club in nearby Hyde.
Boxing became his passion. To improve, he joined Sale West boxing club, almost half an hour away. His parents drove him there four nights a week and waited for an hour or more while he trained. He has never forgotten that. “They were the parents prepared to get off their backsides and run me to the boxing club. If they had been the type to say, ‘Let him off, he’ll be all right, he’ll do his own thing’, I wouldn’t have succeeded.
“People see me in the ring, I am aggressive, a bit of a roughhouse, if that’s the expression. Outside the ring, I am laid-back, don’t let nothing get me down. I like to think I’m polite. From my boxing, people think I’m a headcase, but I surprise people when they meet me.”
He hopes that in time people will hear the name Hattersley and remember it as the place Ricky Hatton came from. “All my mates are from Hattersley, all from the same estate. Around here, Hattersley is infamous for being the place where Myra Hindley and Ian Brady lived when they committed the Moors murders. My dad had the New Inn pub in Hattersley for eight years, and if you walked out the back of the pub, you immediately come to the place where Hindley and Brady once lived, where some of the murders took place.
“The house is not there any more but everyone remembers it. I now live down the road in Gee Cross, which is next to Hyde, now well known for Harold Shipman and all of his victims. If I can do my bit to create better news for this area, that’ll be good.”
Hatton speaks with the maturity of one older and wiser than his 27 years. His education has come in the boxing ring, perhaps the hardest school of all. It has enabled him to grow as a person, to earn more money than he ever imagined possible and to become one of Britain’s best-known sportsmen. He pays his dues to the sport but without romance.
“I look at my boy, Campbell, who will be five in January, and I wouldn’t want him doing this sport. I feel poorly when my brother Matt is fighting, and whether it’s me or Matt, it must be absolute torture for my parents. When I play sport with my boy, it is football in the back garden, and I would rather he was a footballer.”
Is Campbell allowed to watch him fight? “He has seen some of them on tape. I get his mum to show him the fights after they’re over. I won’t let him watch them live. I’m always expected to win, but I don’t think your son should see you getting punched, and you never know the day when you might get knocked out. So we wait until it is over, and if it’s been a good fight for me, we let him see it.
“He understands what I do for a living and he comes to the gym on Wednesdays, watches me and has a little go on the punchbag. In the house he will go through my belts and say, ‘You got this when you beat Kostya Tszyu, this when you beat . . .’ He’s not a baby any more, he was always great company but he talks your head off now, like a little man.”
Hatton and Campbell’s mother, Claire, are not together. You ask about their relationship and he treats the question like any other. “We weren’t together particularly long when Claire got pregnant. I think the worst thing would have been to stay together because of the baby. At first I thought, ‘Can we make it work for Campbell, stay together and see how it goes?’ “It was never going to happen. It couldn’t have turned out better for Campbell, because he has two great families that fuss him. I see him practically every day, his mum sees him every day. I like to spend a couple of hours with him before training; if not, then after training. Because we have never been together, me and Campbell’s mum have never had the need to fall out. We have a great relationship and Campbell has the best of both worlds.”
What Hatton doesn’t say is that when Campbell was born, he set up a trust fund that ensured his son would enjoy a share of what his father earned and set up the standing order that ensured his mother would be able to care properly for their boy. Hatton was 22 at the time, a young fighter on the way up, far from wealthy but already able to accept his responsibilities.
It makes you wonder what happened between Hatton, his father, Ray, and their promoter, allegedly. Is it that fighter/promoter relationships are destined to end in separation and that ultimately the man who is taking the shots is going to want to call the shots? They were together for eight years and their relationship had been as good as it gets between the boxer and his promoter.
Now Warren is suing Hatton for breach of contract, a charge the fighter denies. “I am very disappointed about the break-up with Frank because I wanted to finish my career with him. When my contract had run out, I sat down with allegedly and said, ‘Listen Frank, you’ve always done the best by me, you’ve always given me the best deal. If you continue to do so, you know we will always stay with you’. But I was given an all-round better package by several people, so we had to be honest with Frank. ‘We can’t afford to stay with you because other people are giving us a better deal’.
“We expected Frank to come back with a better offer, or something nearer, but instead of that we got a letter saying he was willing to take us to court. When we asked on what basis he would do that, he said because he had a three-fight contract.”
Warren threatened to take out an injunction stopping Hatton’s world title fight against Maussa in Sheffield, but thought better of it. He is now simply suing Hatton.
“I was very fond of Frank,” says Hatton. “He pulled out of the injunction. It’s a shame. For the first few weeks’ training, I was thinking, ‘Am I training for nothing, is the fight going ahead?’ Once the injunction fell through, it was like a weight off my shoulders.
“The really disappointing thing is that it got a bit personal. I sort of expected negotiation and arguments — that comes with the territory. If it hadn’t got personal, or if it goes to court, I don’t think there’s any turning back.
“My original feeling was this is just one fight (against Maussa) where you couldn’t come near what we were being offered, but we would have had no problems sitting down with Frank and discussing future fights. Now it has got personal and I would like to draw a line under it and say, ‘Thanks for the memories, you go your way and I go mine’.”
THE GYM is now vibrant. Billy “the Preacher” Graham stands in his office and recalls the day Hatton first came to his gym. People in the fight game had talked to him about Hatton, said he was a strong boy who dominated a lot of his amateur opponents. Graham had seen a lot of them in his time, most of them couldn’t live with pros, and he didn’t expect much.
Then the 17-year-old walked through his door. “He was a thick-set kid with a pushed-in nose, I thought, ‘Yeah, you’re just another strong little kid. I put him in with people he shouldn’t have been able to spar with and he was like nothing anybody had described to me. Everybody had got it wrong. His balance, his anticipation, his peripheral vision were all fantastic.
“And he is the best student of the sport I have ever worked with. He’s just like a sponge: he soaks up everything. No matter how experienced the opponent, he won’t be more seasoned than Ricky. He deals with things, holds his nerve before big fights, nothing gets to him, nothing interferes with the fight. I want to earn as much as I can from the sport but working with Ricky Hatton is a trainer’s dream.”
Hatton now stands beside Macklin, who is working on the punchbag, talking to him about technique. In another corner Jenny Dowell talks to a journalist about why she fights for a living. “I just love this sport,” she says. They joke in the gym that she is Billy Graham’s “million dollar baby”. The remarkable part is that Dowel is better looking than Hilary Swank, who played Maggie Fitzgerald in the Hollywood film.
She is asked why she would risk such good looks. “I don’t want to walk around with a smashed-up face,” she says, “but it’s just the same for women as it is for men. We have the same feelings, the same passion, the same hopes. If you want something bad enough, you just get on and do it. They looked at me a bit funny at first, but then I just blended in.”
“I was never a fan of women’s boxing,” says Hatton. “It’s tough in there, sometimes it is not nice watching two men doing it. Then you watch Jenny throwing body shots and uppercuts and you realise how talented she is. And she gets on well with all of the lads.”
And the teenagers who have come from Salford, they must have a photograph with Ricky. They gather around him, they smile and laugh and stick up their fingers and he stands there in the centre, just the flicker of a smile on his lips. While they are taking their position, the Liverpool middleweight Paul Smith slips into the changing room and fills a water bottle. They are smiling for the camera as he sprays them with cold water. The young faces duck and dive and scream their protest. In the midst of them, Hatton holds his position. The water hits his forehand, trickles down his cheek, but his head doesn’t move, there isn’t a word of complaint and that hint of a smile, it never leaves his face.
It's a busy night though - there's also the big bill in Germany on ZDF, plus Johnny Nelson & the Welsh crew in Rome on RAI 2.
Good Hatton interview here -
The Big Interview: Ricky Hatton ( timesonline.co.uk )
The Mancunian world champion is as tough as any in his trade but also an eloquent young man with a sense of perspective, finds David Walsh
It’s an old converted factory in Denton, east of Manchester. The staircase is wooden and beaten-up. Four flights up is an old gymnasium, beyond it the boxing gym. It has a ring, punch bags suspended from the ceiling, posters on the walls, gloves everywhere, drops of perspiration glistening on the dirty brown wooden floor.
There is a small changing room, an office sign that says “Billy ‘The Preacher’ Graham”, and there are people everywhere. Ricky Hatton, arguably rated the world’s best light-welterweight, pounds a bag; his brother Matt shadow- boxes in the ring; another fighter, Matt Macklin, does some exercises; and the gym’s only female pro, Jenny Dowell, works on her combinations.
Many people stand by the side, some sit by the ring, standing no more than a couple of feet away from the fighters as they work. Graham, the trainer, is in his office, watching a video of Macklin’s recent victory over an American, Anthony Little, in Philadelphia. “Matt, you looked so relaxed in Philadelphia,” he will say to Macklin when they talk later.
This morning is busy because Matt Hatton’s girlfriend, Gemma Coyne, has turned up with 13 teenagers from Salford. Gemma works for Salford city council. The boys are all at risk of exclusion from three comprehensive schools in the area, and because they have recently improved their attendance records, their reward is a day watching Ricky Hatton train.
They sit and watch, have a little fun but are never a nuisance. They gather around the punchbag as Hatton works it, each blow accompanied by a guttural grunt. He knows where they come from: the council estates, the tough backgrounds, the hard- case families, the bad-luck stories, the attitudes that cause trouble. They watch him spend his aggression on a leather bag, and because they know where he has come from, they look up to him.
Gary Weir is the smallest of the 13, a sharp-looking 14-year-old with a cheeky smile. He sits by the corner of the ring, his hands worming their way into two unlaced gloves. “Hey, Ricky,” he says during the fighter’s water break. “How did City get on last Saturday?” This is not a question but a jibe. Manchester City lost to Fulham. The kid wants to get under Hatton’s skin and to challenge the champion.
Hatton lets it go at first, but the kid is not one to back off. The talk continues, and then during one of the subsequent water breaks the fighter draws a slug from a water bottle, swishes it round his mouth, fixes the kid with a grin and lets him have it, right between the eyes. Instinctively the kid jumps to his feet, water dripping from his face, and puts up his gloved fists. As if he meant to sort out Ricky Hatton. And the champion, with the same instincts, puts up his fists and everybody in the gym laughs. Hatton paws him gently on the side of the face.
The kid sits down quickly, his honour saved by his smiling face.
THIS is Ricky Hatton’s world: a boxing gym, working-class Manchester, playing for the pub darts team, loving Man City, remembering the kids from the wrong side of the tracks. “A lot of fighters shut themselves away. I’m not like that,” he says. “As long as they’re not getting in the road of my training, anybody who wants can come to the gym, especially those from my local area. I like to think I’ve done the area proud, and people shouldn’t be excluded, especially kids.”
Hatton is 27 and has fought 39 times as a professional, winning every fight, with 29 knockouts. He holds two versions of the light-welterweight world title, the IBF and the WBU, and fights the Colombian Carlos Maussa in Sheffield on Saturday week for the WBA title. After that he wants Floyd Mayweather, the WBC champion, then Miguel Cotto, who holds the WBO title. Although he must first deal with Maussa, victory over Mayweather would establish Hatton as the world’s greatest light-welterweight.
He is a good fighter, Ricky Hatton, but it is character as much as skill that has made him one of the most loved of all British boxers. Manchester City’s manager, Stuart Pearce, and his coaching staff turned up unannounced at his gym last week to watch him work out. Steven Gerrard, Michael Owen, John Terry and Shaun Wright-Phillips are among the footballers to have watched him fight.
The chef Gordon Ramsay, the comedian Roy “Chubby” Brown and the darts world champion Phil Taylor are also fans. Ramsay told Hatton he was welcome any time to a meal on the house at his place in London. Brown sent him a suit he had worn on stage, because they have seen something in Hatton that transcends talent and courage, something that reminds us of human nature’s capacity to surprise.
How to explain this? For Hatton, you may imagine, is just another prizefighter lucky enough to have escaped the council estate. In fact he is so much more. He has come from the heart of working-class England and represented his community with intelligence, humour and decency. Success, fame and wealth have not turned his head, nor have they diluted the straightforwardness that has always been his way.
We talk about his love for Manchester City, the club for which his father and grandfather both played and which he has supported since he was a kid. He too might have been a footballer — he was on City’s books as a teenager — but he was better at boxing. “A lot of people like watching football, but I’m a die-hard. When City get beat on a Saturday, that’s my weekend ruined,” he says.
“When we play United, I’m just as much up for that as for my fights. I know United fans support me and I am a Mancunian, very proud of my town, but when United get beat, I still have a little snigger to myself. I’m a City fan. I have my own box at City now, I bought my own box, but I’m not one that sits there quietly and watches the match, I’m off my seat, cursing the players. As much as I love my team, I will be effin’ and jeffin’ all the way through the game.
“I go to as many away games as possible. It’s nice at away games because I stand in the queue, buy a ticket and then sit with the rest of the City fans. People find it strange, you know. ‘What are you doing here, Ricky?’ I will be in the queue for a pie and Bovril at half-time and fellows will be going, “Is it, no it can’t be, what would he be doing here?’ But if they knew me personally, they would know I don’t see myself as any different to them.
“My best mates now are the guys who were my best mates on our council estate in Hattersley 20 years ago. I still drink at the New Inn pub on the estate, and when I celebrate winning a fight, it’s in my local pub with my old people.”
HATTERSLEY is a small suburb about eight miles east of Manchester. It was here that Hatton grew up, the older of two sports-loving boys. He played football but longed to be a kick-boxer, a dream that perished on the rock of short and stumpy legs. Roy Williams, his kick-boxing coach, told him to try boxing, and he started at the boxing club in nearby Hyde.
Boxing became his passion. To improve, he joined Sale West boxing club, almost half an hour away. His parents drove him there four nights a week and waited for an hour or more while he trained. He has never forgotten that. “They were the parents prepared to get off their backsides and run me to the boxing club. If they had been the type to say, ‘Let him off, he’ll be all right, he’ll do his own thing’, I wouldn’t have succeeded.
“People see me in the ring, I am aggressive, a bit of a roughhouse, if that’s the expression. Outside the ring, I am laid-back, don’t let nothing get me down. I like to think I’m polite. From my boxing, people think I’m a headcase, but I surprise people when they meet me.”
He hopes that in time people will hear the name Hattersley and remember it as the place Ricky Hatton came from. “All my mates are from Hattersley, all from the same estate. Around here, Hattersley is infamous for being the place where Myra Hindley and Ian Brady lived when they committed the Moors murders. My dad had the New Inn pub in Hattersley for eight years, and if you walked out the back of the pub, you immediately come to the place where Hindley and Brady once lived, where some of the murders took place.
“The house is not there any more but everyone remembers it. I now live down the road in Gee Cross, which is next to Hyde, now well known for Harold Shipman and all of his victims. If I can do my bit to create better news for this area, that’ll be good.”
Hatton speaks with the maturity of one older and wiser than his 27 years. His education has come in the boxing ring, perhaps the hardest school of all. It has enabled him to grow as a person, to earn more money than he ever imagined possible and to become one of Britain’s best-known sportsmen. He pays his dues to the sport but without romance.
“I look at my boy, Campbell, who will be five in January, and I wouldn’t want him doing this sport. I feel poorly when my brother Matt is fighting, and whether it’s me or Matt, it must be absolute torture for my parents. When I play sport with my boy, it is football in the back garden, and I would rather he was a footballer.”
Is Campbell allowed to watch him fight? “He has seen some of them on tape. I get his mum to show him the fights after they’re over. I won’t let him watch them live. I’m always expected to win, but I don’t think your son should see you getting punched, and you never know the day when you might get knocked out. So we wait until it is over, and if it’s been a good fight for me, we let him see it.
“He understands what I do for a living and he comes to the gym on Wednesdays, watches me and has a little go on the punchbag. In the house he will go through my belts and say, ‘You got this when you beat Kostya Tszyu, this when you beat . . .’ He’s not a baby any more, he was always great company but he talks your head off now, like a little man.”
Hatton and Campbell’s mother, Claire, are not together. You ask about their relationship and he treats the question like any other. “We weren’t together particularly long when Claire got pregnant. I think the worst thing would have been to stay together because of the baby. At first I thought, ‘Can we make it work for Campbell, stay together and see how it goes?’ “It was never going to happen. It couldn’t have turned out better for Campbell, because he has two great families that fuss him. I see him practically every day, his mum sees him every day. I like to spend a couple of hours with him before training; if not, then after training. Because we have never been together, me and Campbell’s mum have never had the need to fall out. We have a great relationship and Campbell has the best of both worlds.”
What Hatton doesn’t say is that when Campbell was born, he set up a trust fund that ensured his son would enjoy a share of what his father earned and set up the standing order that ensured his mother would be able to care properly for their boy. Hatton was 22 at the time, a young fighter on the way up, far from wealthy but already able to accept his responsibilities.
It makes you wonder what happened between Hatton, his father, Ray, and their promoter, allegedly. Is it that fighter/promoter relationships are destined to end in separation and that ultimately the man who is taking the shots is going to want to call the shots? They were together for eight years and their relationship had been as good as it gets between the boxer and his promoter.
Now Warren is suing Hatton for breach of contract, a charge the fighter denies. “I am very disappointed about the break-up with Frank because I wanted to finish my career with him. When my contract had run out, I sat down with allegedly and said, ‘Listen Frank, you’ve always done the best by me, you’ve always given me the best deal. If you continue to do so, you know we will always stay with you’. But I was given an all-round better package by several people, so we had to be honest with Frank. ‘We can’t afford to stay with you because other people are giving us a better deal’.
“We expected Frank to come back with a better offer, or something nearer, but instead of that we got a letter saying he was willing to take us to court. When we asked on what basis he would do that, he said because he had a three-fight contract.”
Warren threatened to take out an injunction stopping Hatton’s world title fight against Maussa in Sheffield, but thought better of it. He is now simply suing Hatton.
“I was very fond of Frank,” says Hatton. “He pulled out of the injunction. It’s a shame. For the first few weeks’ training, I was thinking, ‘Am I training for nothing, is the fight going ahead?’ Once the injunction fell through, it was like a weight off my shoulders.
“The really disappointing thing is that it got a bit personal. I sort of expected negotiation and arguments — that comes with the territory. If it hadn’t got personal, or if it goes to court, I don’t think there’s any turning back.
“My original feeling was this is just one fight (against Maussa) where you couldn’t come near what we were being offered, but we would have had no problems sitting down with Frank and discussing future fights. Now it has got personal and I would like to draw a line under it and say, ‘Thanks for the memories, you go your way and I go mine’.”
THE GYM is now vibrant. Billy “the Preacher” Graham stands in his office and recalls the day Hatton first came to his gym. People in the fight game had talked to him about Hatton, said he was a strong boy who dominated a lot of his amateur opponents. Graham had seen a lot of them in his time, most of them couldn’t live with pros, and he didn’t expect much.
Then the 17-year-old walked through his door. “He was a thick-set kid with a pushed-in nose, I thought, ‘Yeah, you’re just another strong little kid. I put him in with people he shouldn’t have been able to spar with and he was like nothing anybody had described to me. Everybody had got it wrong. His balance, his anticipation, his peripheral vision were all fantastic.
“And he is the best student of the sport I have ever worked with. He’s just like a sponge: he soaks up everything. No matter how experienced the opponent, he won’t be more seasoned than Ricky. He deals with things, holds his nerve before big fights, nothing gets to him, nothing interferes with the fight. I want to earn as much as I can from the sport but working with Ricky Hatton is a trainer’s dream.”
Hatton now stands beside Macklin, who is working on the punchbag, talking to him about technique. In another corner Jenny Dowell talks to a journalist about why she fights for a living. “I just love this sport,” she says. They joke in the gym that she is Billy Graham’s “million dollar baby”. The remarkable part is that Dowel is better looking than Hilary Swank, who played Maggie Fitzgerald in the Hollywood film.
She is asked why she would risk such good looks. “I don’t want to walk around with a smashed-up face,” she says, “but it’s just the same for women as it is for men. We have the same feelings, the same passion, the same hopes. If you want something bad enough, you just get on and do it. They looked at me a bit funny at first, but then I just blended in.”
“I was never a fan of women’s boxing,” says Hatton. “It’s tough in there, sometimes it is not nice watching two men doing it. Then you watch Jenny throwing body shots and uppercuts and you realise how talented she is. And she gets on well with all of the lads.”
And the teenagers who have come from Salford, they must have a photograph with Ricky. They gather around him, they smile and laugh and stick up their fingers and he stands there in the centre, just the flicker of a smile on his lips. While they are taking their position, the Liverpool middleweight Paul Smith slips into the changing room and fills a water bottle. They are smiling for the camera as he sprays them with cold water. The young faces duck and dive and scream their protest. In the midst of them, Hatton holds his position. The water hits his forehand, trickles down his cheek, but his head doesn’t move, there isn’t a word of complaint and that hint of a smile, it never leaves his face.