Ricky Hatton, my father and me

June 5th, 2005. It wasn’t a normal morning in the life of a 15-year-old boy. I was woken by a gentle knock at my bedroom door, wiped the sleep from my eyes and tiptoed downstairs to a pitch-black living room.

My father fumbled for the buried television remote as I sat cross-legged on the floor, squinting at the screen as it zapped to life, adjusting my vision.

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The timing was impeccable. A papered blue moon penetrated the middle of the screen and my hero, a hooded Ricky Hatton, waited to burst through it and make the 39th ring walk of his professional career.

The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. The atmosphere inside the electric M.E.N Arena, Manchester, England could be felt anywhere in the country by means of a British boxing osmosis.

Hatton was challenging Kostya Tszyu for the IBF and Ring Magazine titles at junior welterweight in a fight that would go on to define his career. It was an appointment viewing.

We traded predictions. I can’t recall how either of us saw the fight playing out. My youthful loyalty and blind patriotism probably called an early Hatton knockout. My father’s more measured, logical thought-process would have swayed toward the champion riding the Manchester storm with professional ease.

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After all, Tszyu wasn’t an ordinary opponent. A unified world champion, considered a top three pound-for-pound star, the 35-year-old’s name struck fear. The Australians and Russians revered him, the Americans respected him, Britons feared him. He had flattened Zab Judah, stopped the legendary Julio Cesar Chavez and was on a nine-fight winning streak as a world champion. He was the finished article.

Hatton, by contrast, was seen by many as too raw, too untested, too ordinary to breach the fortress that Tszyu had built at 140 pounds — 38-0 and unbeaten, but too long spent navigating the bizarre and sometimes laborious waters of a WBU (World Boxing Union) title reign. Hatton was a betting underdog, but only slightly. Timing is everything in boxing — for fighters, yes, but especially for matchmakers — and his promoter, Frank Warren, timed this pick to perfection.

“When you look at the all-time 140-pound greats, Tszyu’s right up there,” Hatton told Boxing News magazine in 2011. “Nobody — and I mean nobody — gave me a chance of winning. They thought, ‘Ricky, with his leaky defense, he’ll walk onto that right hand; he can get cut … Kostya Tszyu just hits too hard’.

“It was only me and my trainer, Billy Graham, who thought I could win. We used to sit on the steps at the Phoenix Camp — I’d have a cup of tea, Billy would have a smoke — and the advice he was giving to beat Tszyu, I thought, ‘He’s got it spot on again here,’ but no one else shared our enthusiasm.

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“I got in the ring, and you’d have thought there was a speaker underneath it because it was vibrating,” he continued. “I kept telling myself, ‘Don’t let your arse go now,’ and I was looking across at Tszyu thinking, ‘Everyone believes you’re going to destroy me, but you’ll need an Uzi to stop me tonight.’”

Hatton refused to fight as a traditional underdog. It wasn’t in his psyche. Hunger. Relentless energy. Bravery. These were the traits that defined him. From the first bell, he smothered the champion, refusing to give him space to breathe, never mind detonating his legendary right hand.

The capacity crowd shook the rafters with every breath. Every punch was felt by my father and I just as vividly, despite sitting 200 miles from that Manchester cauldron. I’d shuffle closer and closer to the television screen, eyes sucked in like a whirlpool. My father would brace himself, balancing on what felt like millimeters of the sofa’s edge.

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Round after round, Hatton pressed, mauled and hammered. He ate punches, yes — but he gave them back in abundance, furious clusters accompanied by his infamous verbal shrieks as he unloaded. He bounced forward like a man unwilling to contemplate a step backward. By the halfway mark, Tszyu’s aura had begun to crack. By the 10th, the once-invincible champion looked weary.

Then came the moment: At the end of the 11th round, Tszyu sat down on his stool. And he stayed there. No 12th round, no final stand. One of boxing’s great warriors had enough. It would be the last time the world saw the “Thunder from Down Under” inside a boxing ring.

Ricky Hatton was the new IBF junior welterweight champion of the world. The arena exploded. Grown men weeping, kids — kept awake by a sporting promise and enough soda to sink a small ship — held aloft to grab an unobstructed view, and families hugging, bouncing in unison.

Back in west London, we were both standing in awe, mouths agape. Birdsong had begun in the garden, a time foreign to me was displaying on the clock, but this was no dream. “There’s only one Ricky Hatton” reverberated around the M.E.N. Arena, and it was impossible to ignore the urge to sing along.

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British boxing was overdue for a new king, and this was his coronation.

The following morning, my life changed forever. My father took his own life following a short, but vicious fight against depression.

Suddenly, the world looked a different place.

In the years that followed, watching Hatton fight became a comfort to me. A blanket of violence I could wrap myself up in, distracted from the harsh realities of the surrounding world I wrestled to understand.

A four-fight win streak following Tszyu’s dethroning saw Hatton cross paths with the No. 1 fighter in the sport: Floyd Mayweather Jr.

Now accustomed to staying up until the wee hours, 2007’s Mayweather fight allowed me to pass the Hatton-baton onto my friends. Following a birthday party, I gathered the troops, marched us all home — via a kebab shop, almost in tribute to “The Hitman” — to collectively watch the fight billed “Undefeated,” all through intoxicated eyes.

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Mayweather was the one to stay undefeated on an evening where the Mancunian had taken well over 20,000 fans to Las Vegas in support; the Hatton bug was spreading at an unrelenting pace. But Hatton, himself, struggled to keep up.

Hatton would only win twice more, against Juan Lazcano and Paulie Malignaggi, and in his subsequent fight, a brutal Manny Pacquiao left hook from the gods sent him spiraling. These two defeats broke him.

“I was so down, I was crying and breaking out and contemplating suicide,” Hatton told the BBC in 2011. “I was getting depressed. Depression is a serious thing and, after my defeat to Manny Pacquiao, I contemplated retirement and didn’t cope with it very well.”

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“A lot of people say, ‘I’ve tried committing suicide’ — but there’s saying it and doing it, and it was coming on a regular basis. People don’t realize how deadly [depression] can be.”

Hatton returned to the ring, as a professional, for one final time, a year after this candid interview, against Ukraine’s Vyacheslav Senchenko. It was the Manchester homecoming that the then 34-year-old craved so badly, and he started the proceedings as a heavy betting favorite against a man who had suffered an exposing TKO defeat to Malignaggi earlier that year.

As a broke graduate in my early 20s, I felt compelled to make the trip north for Hatton’s would-be swan song. An overnight coach landed myself and a friend in Manchester to soak up the entrancing atmosphere that flooded the city center. There was expectation in the air, a belief that Hatton 2.0 could rule again, but for me, it felt more like closure.

Hatton was a shadow of his former self. His fairytale return morphed into a nightmare and his career ended via ninth-round knockout, courtesy of a spiteful left hook to the body. His demons accelerated.

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“I tried to kill myself several times,” Hatton told the BBC in 2016, four years after announcing his retirement. “I used to go to the pub, come back, take the knife out and sit there in the dark crying hysterically.”

In the years that followed, Hatton struggled to fill the void that boxing left. He had been left heartbroken by a bitter estrangement from his parents and he yearned a return to the simpler days of being a world champion. He trained his son, Campbell, to 14-2 before he, himself, retired at the end of last year, as well as working with talent including Zhanat Zhakiyanov, Ryan Burnett, Chloe Watson, Nathan Gorman, Paul Upton and Tommy Fury. But the hunger to return to the ring himself still ran deep.

An unscored exhibition bout with Mexican boxing legend Marco Antonio Barrera in 2022 wasn’t enough to scratch the infinite itch, and this past summer Hatton confirmed he was planning a return to the ring as a professional on Dec. 2 in Dubai, fighting the United Arab Emirates’ Eisa Al Dah at middleweight.

I made contact with Hatton shortly after this news broke. We had worked on a couple of articles previously — one detailing his obsession and love for his football team, Manchester City — and we agreed that I would visit him in camp for a special feature in the build up to December’s slated return.

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That’s the thing with Ricky — he had time for everyone. And, more importantly, he was just like everyone else. Outside the ring, that is.

Over the years, countless friends have peppered me with selfies of them meeting Hatton out and about. At airports, in pubs, at football matches, on holiday; the list goes on. If there was a good time to be had, he was there, and a queue would inevitably form to share a fleeting moment in his presence. He’d always oblige.

Last summer, he was in the midst of a speaking tour when he visited my home town. I recommended to him a local pub to visit afterward, of which he took me up on. I resisted the temptation to join him, although I know I would have been welcomed. He pocket-dialed me later that evening. I answered to muffled noises, foolishly (and embarrassingly) thinking he may have had a pint waiting for me, getting flat.

Last year, as a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America, I had the honor of voting Hatton into the Boxing Hall of Fame, and I couldn’t have been prouder to have done so. If I could have voted for him five times, I would have done so in a heartbeat.

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“You never think of when you lace the gloves on at 10 years old that you’ll end up in the Hall of Fame with some of the great fighters already there,” Hatton said when his induction was announced. “I’m a bit speechless. There’s no greater honor. I’m delighted.”

I woke Sunday to the crushing news of Hatton’s passing in Las Vegas, a stone’s throw away from where “The Hitman” carved hundreds of memories for thousands of fans over five unforgettable nights. An official cause of death has yet to be confirmed.

Boxing is littered with tragedy and death, but it’s a mark of Hatton’s character how widely spread and deeply this loss has been felt. Thoughts, of course, belong to the family and friends he leaves behind, but also to a sport that simply adored him.

“That’s my medication — making people happy. It makes me feel good about myself,” Hatton said at the peak of his powers.

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A 15-year-old me and my late father would have smiled at that. Wishing we could have offered the same in return.

Ricky Hatton was a keen supporter of Samaritans. Information and support can be found here: