by Ricky Hatton
As he walked down The Strip, fans were stopping him, asking him how he was doing and who he thought would win.
If he hadn’t had such a great, supportive family with his gran and his uncle I would have adopted James, no doubt. Everyone knows him in our area and in the end we managed to get a house built for them. He’s well loved.
So, as he had done in England many times, he was tasked with carrying my belt into the ring for Pacquiao. The only problem was that when I saw James in the ring at the MGM Grand it was not the same me he’d met in the ring so many times before.
The fans were out in force, as they had been all week, and the weigh-in was packed again, but as I paced around the ring before the first bell I just thought to myself, ‘You’ve blown it, you’ve absolutely blown it. You fucking peach, you’ve left it in training camp. You should have fought this fight four weeks ago.’ I was beaten before I got in there. In the first round, before Manny first nailed me, I thought I was just coming into it – looking for my shot. I was even more reckless than usual that night. I hit him with a right hand and he went back.
Then it all went badly wrong.
Being a very good fighter, Pacquiao could tell how wild I was and his eyes lit up, as if he was thinking, ‘I’m just going to need one shot here. He’s coming in recklessly; his defence is all over the show.’ He put me down twice in the first round and the mountain I had to climb became even steeper. I had to see out the round in the end, but I thought if I could pressure him in the second, I could still get a grip on the fight – I could still land that punch.
Lee Beard, who was in the corner with Floyd Sr, said he felt I’d shaken off the knockdowns and I was able to turn the corner if I could get through the next round. That sounded good to me.
I hit Manny with a right hand that put him back on his heels a little bit, but he was practically looking at the floor when he winged over that enormous left hand and bang – one shot – and that was that. There I was, flat on my back. I looked like a shell of the Ricky Hatton everyone knew in there. I was a shell of myself.
I had a feeling Pacquiao was capable of doing what he did. I later saw the horrific pictures of Jennifer, inconsolable at ringside. She was in bits as I lay there, stretched out. I had just been knocked out. I was more than devastated.
I was marching back to the dressing room and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie came to see me. ‘You all right, Ricky?’ Brad asked. I didn’t even recognize them. I just said, ‘Yeah,’ and sulked straight past him. Because it was such a shocking knockout, Angelina had asked to come into the changing rooms to check if I was okay. I didn’t give a shit who they were.
It is all very blurry, but I remember young James Bowes coming in. He was really upset, he had never seen me lose before and to see me knocked out in that manner made him very down. ‘Don’t worry, James,’ I said. ‘I’m okay.’ Physically I was fine. ‘I love you, Ricky,’ he said, tearfully. ‘I love you too, mate.’ The fight could have gone better, but I hoped he enjoyed the trip, and I think he did.
Every now and then, to this day, I pop over to his house. He’s in his early twenties and he’s still very poorly, and I hope he continues proving everyone wrong. He’s amazing. When you think all those years ago it seemed he only had a matter of time, he has done so well. What a fighter he is.
In my career, I had been able to beat fighters who were more talented than me because I had such a big heart and a big will, and with them I could perhaps overpower people. After getting destroyed by Pacquiao it was very hard for someone like me to take. I was distraught.
My family were in my dressing room but we had no idea where Floyd Sr was. We later heard he just came in, put on his snazzy suit and trilby, and was off to another press conference. I had barely picked my head up off the canvas and he was on to the next thing he wanted to do.
I was really in a bad way but it didn’t set in straight away. The next day there was a pool party at the MGM Grand. ‘Go on, Ricky. Put a brave face on,’ I said to myself. ‘Get a few beers in you.’ So I did, but the moment I came home to sunny old England, the bright lights of Sin City disappeared, the cameras stopped rolling and Las Vegas was gone. It all goes. You come back to Gee Cross and your life starts again. Proper life. It was then that everything about Pacquiao and what had happened really hit home.
Once I got home I cancelled all of my functions. I wouldn’t talk. I just didn’t want to leave the house. I was ashamed, actually hanging my head in shame, sulking. When people said I’d been beaten by the two best fighters in the world it meant nothing to me, absolutely nothing – I didn’t care who they were. The depression that had lurked since the Mayweather loss was rearing its head once more. The crying in the gym before the fight was another sign that I was not the same person any more.
I went from bad to worse. It had been a devastating defeat and a spectacular knockout with far-reaching consequences in my mind. The Mayweather fight had started a roller coaster of ups and downs – an emotional express train that I was virtually unable to drive. I was gutted after Mayweather, devastated. Then there was the Lazcano fight, and it wasn’t a great performance, and I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, this could be it.’ Followed by falling out with Billy, working with a new trainer, and then a great performance against Malignaggi, with people saying it was my best since Kostya Tszyu. Finally there was Pacquiao, which was terrible.
That defeat was hard for me to comprehend and even harder to deal with. I had walked through Kostya Tszyu’s best shots, been a two-weight world champion and thousands of fans had travelled thousands of miles to see me in a fight that didn’t last five minutes. I shouldn’t have been in the ring that night, or even near one.
People were starting to call for me to retire and with all that was going for me mentally, I thought, ‘They might have a fucking point here.’
CHAPTER 11
Depression
I remember when I first thought that it could be all over and that I might never box again. Me and Jennifer went to Australia after the Manny Pacquiao fight. Australia was always a holiday destination I’d fancied; I have several friends over there but had never been, and as I weighed up fighting again we thought three or four weeks sightseeing in Australia would give us a good chance to relax before I hit the gym again on my return. I would go as far as saying it was the best holiday I’d ever had – I loved Australia and the people. We flew out to Hong Kong and then had the holiday of a lifetime in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, the Whitsundays and Cairns. Surprisingly for me, I actually trained in some of the hotel gyms, but we had such a great time the holiday blues started to kick in when we stopped in Singapore on the way back.
Sat around the pool, Jennifer asked, ‘Training Monday?’ ‘Oh yeah. I know. I don’t believe it. I’ve got to go through all of that shit again,’ I replied bluntly. I did want to do it but, at the same time, I didn’t. This was the first time she’d heard me react to training like that. Normally, when I’ve had some time off to regroup, I’m chomping at the bit to get back. This time it was different.
‘In all the years I’ve known you,’ Jen said, ‘you always have that last drink and turn round and say, “Bring it on.”’
All of a sudden it had become, ‘I can’t believe I’ve got to go back to the gym.’ Still, fighting is what I do and so inevitably when I got home I went back. But the reaction I experienced around the pool in Singapore would not leave me. In the gym I did some training but I just couldn’t be arsed, I really couldn’t. I was working with Manchester trainer Bob Shannon, who I’d known for years, had always liked and who was training the fighters I was now promoting. ‘Bob, can you get the bodybelt on so I can have a blast?’ Nothing, absolutely nothing – not even doing some hard rounds – came back to me; it was like rubbing two sticks together hoping for a spark – but it wasn’t happening.
‘Jesus, Rick, it’s over,’ I thought to myself. ‘It’s never going to happen again.’ Something that used to come so easily to me, training and dieting – I ju
st couldn’t do it. That was it, all gone. It had ended on the worst night of my career and there was no chance I was going to be able to make it right. That’s not what I wanted to find out. When I first walked through the boxing-gym door, aged ten, if you’d said to me that in the future I’d win four world titles in two weight divisions, headline in Las Vegas, box at Man City, Noel and Liam would carry my belts in, then I think the ten-year-old me might have thought, ‘I will get to do everything I want to do.’ But was it enough?
You need hunger in boxing. It’s such a tough, hard sport; you have to want it, you need to want it. Because when you sit in your nice house with your nice car parked out front and you’ve got to go back to the gym on Monday, you just don’t need it. It’s a hundred per cent sport and, to be honest with you, I was thinking, ‘Should I give it another go?’ I was torn, saying to myself, ‘Well, you’ve done all right, Rick. See how you feel.’ But when I did try I just couldn’t get going again.
It drove me insane. The further I got from fighting again, the worse I was. I’ve always had a bit of a drink but when I had a beer on top of how I was feeling, I just felt worse and worse. Before I knew it, I was having blackouts and forgetting meetings. It was unbearable.
I cancelled all my other functions out of embarrassment. Those were bad times, the worst of times. I was in a horrible place, not knowing if I should give it one more go. I did not really know if I was coming or going. I had too much time on my hands, really. I had been sat there sulking. I was there thinking, ‘It’s never going to happen again,’ and I ended up losing the plot, really.
I could never have known what effect this depression would have on me. I don’t think anyone could. I would just sit on my own around the house. Sometimes I’d just play darts, have a game of pool, watch a bit of TV and Jennifer would come up and ask me what I was doing up there by myself but sometimes I just liked that. It’s all I felt like doing: ‘What’s left for me in my life? I’m never going to have that feeling you get from fighting again.’ I did not like the person I was becoming. I spent my time on my own, in my games room at home, asking myself why and where it had all gone wrong and what I had done to deserve it. I was so lonely.
My games room was filled with memories – good ones – everywhere I looked. It’s a big old place with a balcony that looks over my indoor swimming pool, with its Manchester City emblem at the bottom. There are framed pictures of my fights and shiny cabinets with gloves, shorts and pictures of some of the matches that made me ‘The Hitman’. There’s a Guinness pump at the bar and memorabilia from the sporting and entertainment worlds signed by famous friends all over the walls. In the middle of the room is a pool table with a sky-blue Manchester City cloth. Anyone would love a room like this; well, any self-respecting City fan would anyway. But even things that should upset me within boxing make me smile. I look at the picture of me so badly cut against Jon Thaxton. Horrible, that one, blood everywhere, but it makes me grin, it was a good night. There’s the big cabinet with gloves and pictures of the Floyd Mayweather fight tidily placed inside. He was a prick, a bloody good fighter, if a complete pillock. He wound me up, but those memories are surprisingly good ones, although it was heartbreaking to lose my undefeated record. Then there’re pictures from the Kostya Tszyu fight, and if I look at them and then close my eyes, I can hear the crowd once more. It’s heaven, if only until I reopen my eyes and realize that moment is further away than ever.
Then there was the Manny Pacquiao fight. That is different from the others and the pictures from that haunt me. Me, flat on my back, unconscious in the second round. What a way to go out. After everything in my career, the worst fight of my life was going to be my last. That’s a cruel way to leave a sport you have done a lot in. I didn’t want that be the last thing people saw, or how they remembered me. I’ve always been a proud person and a proud fighter, so for someone like me to get laid out like that in two rounds was very, very hard to take.
I couldn’t show my face after the Mayweather fight for weeks. After Pacquiao it was months. I sat at home in morbid silence. I didn’t know what to do with myself. After a while I’d be restless, stand up, move about, then sit back down again. I was rattling about the house, aimless.
Everything that I had stood for over the last twenty years was gone. I was Ricky Hatton, a boxer. The boy next door, the Manchester lad anyone could have a drink with. A two-weight world champion, who’d taken more than 25,000 fans to Las Vegas – twice. I had all of these great memories around me but it was just depressing. I didn’t want them to be memories, I wanted them back. I wanted to smell the Las Vegas casinos again. I wanted to be fit and muscular, to look at myself in the mirror and think ‘Ricky Fatton?’ They weren’t saying that on my fight nights.
I watched the Oscar-winning film Raging Bull, starring Robert De Niro as Jake LaMotta, with Jennifer one night. In one bit LaMotta was fighting Marcel Cerdan, and he’s coming through the changing rooms, up the arena steps and about to get in the ring. I leant towards Jennifer and said, ‘You know what? That’s what I miss the most about it: walking to the ring, hearing the crowd.’ The roar of the crowd – I missed that more than anything. You can see the passion in the crowd’s eyes. You’d look out into the venue and they’d all look at you and scream, ‘Come on, Ricky, you can do it.’ There’s no feeling like it, absolutely nothing. Everywhere I went, the crowds were always so passionate for me – even at the weigh-in for the Floyd Mayweather fight, when more than 8,000 turned up – Las Vegas did not know what had hit it.
You can’t replace that buzz. Life became empty without it. I couldn’t accept it was over. I contemplated formally announcing my retirement as the depression really hit me. Depression is a horrible thing, and it’s hard to explain. I would have given it all up for one more fight, for the hairs to stand up on the back of my neck as I heard the roar of the crowd and ‘Blue Moon’ one more time.
I suffered badly from depression and then I was drinking too much. But you’ve got to . . . all of us have got to have something to get out of bed for in the morning. Nearly two years after that night in Las Vegas I felt I had lost too much ground. I had a lot of weight to shift, again, and whenever I tried to get something going in the gym I could feel an emptiness in the pit of my stomach that had never been there when I started training camps before.
A lot of people think my depression came on the minute Manny Pacquiao beat me, when I had to start thinking about retirement, but I don’t think it was just those things. I think it started as far back as the Mayweather defeat, two years earlier in 2007, when I apologized to the fans. I reckon that is when the ball started rolling downhill. It really knocked my confidence when I, who prided myself on my heart and courage in the ring, was knocked out. I just wanted to say sorry to everyone. I was thinking about how it impacted on everyone else, without thinking what it would do to me. I felt terrible, that I had let them all down; inside I was not the same person any more.
Eventually, when I did go out, I started getting paranoid. I was just walking into the pub and everyone was looking at me; I’d see someone smiling across the room and think, ‘Is he laughing at me?’
‘Ah, look at the tough guy who got put on his arse.’ That’s what I believed people were thinking.
It’s very rare for a mate to phone up and say, ‘Are you going out?’ and me say, ‘No.’ But that’s how bad it got, and it got worse. I went round and round in circles, going over and over again in my mind the things that had happened. In quieter moments, when I watched the Mayweather fight back, I still had a lot of anger towards the referee; I felt really hard done by. Then, when I came back and had the big fight at Man City in front of 58,000, it was really special but I was poor. I won comfortably, but people were saying I was past it, that I had not been the same since the defeat and that I should pack it in. I wasn’t having that, but because the way I fought against Lazcano was not great, I had my own doubts. I started to think, ‘Jesus Christ, am I gone? Am I finished?’ The more I pondered o
ver it, the worse it became.
The Malignaggi fight brought me back up on a high and I thought it was one of my best fights, but these highs and lows were what I think triggered the depression. That yo-yo effect can really mess you up. That’s the problem with having such big highs. The lows eventually match them in their magnitude.
It wasn’t the right way to think because I had family and friends and I was fortunate with everything I’d done in boxing, but I couldn’t help thinking, ‘What’s left for me in my life? It’s just going to be shit from here on in.’ That’s what I thought. Once that depression gets hold of you, it doesn’t matter how tough you are, how many fights you’ve had or what you’ve got in the world. You’re struggling. It is the hardest thing possible to cope with.
I started going out again. I don’t even know why – I was not even enjoying myself, just getting more and more drunk. I was losing myself in Guinness after Guinness. I didn’t care what I looked like, who I was with, what I was doing. I was on a suicide mission. I just wanted to self-destruct. I put on loads of weight, more than ever before. I didn’t give a shit what I looked like – I was fifteen stone and I didn’t care.
I went through a lot of money. I’ve got loads of pals so there was always someone to drag out. Before I knew it, I was going out Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday, Sunday night, Monday . . . It was absolutely crackers. Out night after night, drinking more and more.
There is always a reason. There has to be a trigger.