War and Peace

by Ricky Hatton

  It means I can be a hard person to work with and, if Billy had turned round and said not to go out, not to drink and just train every minute, it wouldn’t have worked. Billy had to learn to deal with me – not just as a trainer but as a person. I recall him saying, ‘I don’t think you’re a sergeant major-type, Ricky. If I told you not to go out for a pint you’d probably tell me to fuck off.’

  ‘Yeah, I probably would.’

  ‘All I will say to you,’ Billy replied, ‘is you can go out, have a drink and I will come out with you and you can put a bit of weight on. As long as twelve weeks before that fight you come to the gym, get your weight down, do everything right and don’t touch a drop. You’ve got to do your weight, your road-work, your sparring and dedicate yourself to this. If I find you’re misbehaving in that twelve-week period, I will know when you come in that gym because you will be blowing out of your arse. You will be overweight and the minute that happens you won’t fight. I will pull you out of every fight. As long as you don’t let me down, I won’t have to do that.’

  That became the way we worked. He’d phone me up on the Friday before we’d start our twelve weeks and say, ‘Are you out tomorrow?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah, I’m out tomorrow. Saturday night.’ He’d remind me, ‘That’s your last one, you know that, you little bastard? Gym, half twelve, Monday. That’s it. Twelve weeks. On your diet, on your roadwork. Don’t let me down.’

  I never did. I wouldn’t cut any corners, not one.

  I had just turned twenty-one when I met London’s Bernard Paul, a former Commonwealth champion who had won twenty-one fights, lost eight and drawn four, at the Bowlers Arena in Manchester. Before you fight for a major title you tend to meet former champions, who might be on the way down. Paul was a big puncher and I boxed a great fight against him. He would fly off his stool like a greyhound, a hundred miles an hour throwing dozens of shots, but I had a decent boxing brain that I was never really given credit for and I certainly wasn’t at the time: ‘Just tuck up. Catch the shots, slip them, cover up. Let the storm blow itself out. He’s not going to keep this up for twelve rounds.’

  In about round three I started to put my foot on the gas and began to hurt him with shots to the body and punches to the head. Round four, I began to find a few more openings and then – out of nowhere – he quit on his stool with a bad hand. I couldn’t believe it and felt cheated out of finishing the fight off in style. ‘You flew off your stool at a hundred miles an hour and now I’m about to have a go back that’s it?’ I felt like he’d been told to give it his all for four rounds and if he didn’t get me he would be pulled out when I started to turn the tables! In that fourth round he was still lobbing punches like he was trying to decapitate me, when, all of a sudden, he had this bad hand. Mind you, I have a hard head and he hit it enough so maybe he did damage his hand.

  The year ended better than the previous one had with another win at Everton, over former British champion Mark Winters. He was a decent boxer but he’d not had that many fights – winning thirteen of sixteen – and I beat him with body shots. Having stopped two former champions I felt it proved I was probably ready for a title shot, or I was getting close to one.

  The first six months of 2000 sped by and I kept busy with stoppage wins over Leoncio Garces, from Mexico, Pedro Alonso Teran and Ambioris Figuero. Garces was beaten in three on the bill that was headlined by Mike Tyson, whose whirlwind visit of Britain ended with him destroying Julius Francis in two rounds in front of 20,000 fans at the MEN Arena in Manchester. Teran, also a Mexican, and Figuero, from the Dominican Republic, were dispatched in four rounds on smaller shows in Liverpool and Warrington respectively.

  For my twentieth fight I had my third contest in America, this time in Detroit, and I felt like I was on the cusp of big fights.

  I had plenty on my mind, though. I had met a girl called Claire and we went out for a while. She was expecting our baby and I was only twenty-two. Everyone knew I wasn’t myself but I didn’t tell anyone what she and I knew, not even my mum and dad. I just thought we had to get Detroit out of the way and then I could get home and we could work out what we would do.

  We got out there early and me, my dad, Billy and our cutsman Mick Williamson went to the famous Kronk Gym. It is well known that it was always hot in there, a real sweatbox, and it is where the great Emanuel Steward groomed so many champions over the years. It was boiling, a hundred and twenty degrees with the heaters firing and the walls sweating, and me, Billy and Mick were probably the only white people in there, maybe even in the neighbourhood. I put my gloves on, with Mick helping me, but by the time he’d finished the sweat was absolutely dripping out of him. ‘Facking hell, I’ve got to get out of here,’ he said, in his broad cockney accent.

  It was absolutely sweltering so I took my shirt off to hit the bag and warm up. I always grunted when I punched and, looking dead young and pale, I think some of the fighters there were quietly taking the piss out of me. Then Billy and I got in the ring on the bodybelt and it was bang, bang, bang, bang, step round, bang, bang, bang, bang. It changed their perceptions because afterwards all of the other fighters came up to me, asking me my name and what my record was. It had gone from ‘Who’s this little, pale-faced white kid grunting like an idiot?’ to all of a sudden thinking ‘Fucking hell. That’s not bad, is it?’ That was quite pleasing.

  But again it almost went horribly wrong thanks to that skin around my eyes. There was another bad cut, one of the worst I had, and as a consequence it was one of very few fights where I thought I’d blown it. I was fighting Gilbert Quiros, a big puncher from Costa Rica. His nickname was ‘The Animal’, and that was a bit of a giveaway about what I was dealing with. ‘Not bad,’ they said about him. ‘How tall?’ I asked. ‘Oh, he’s between five-seven and six foot,’ they said. ‘Well, that’s almost fucking everyone at our weight, isn’t it?’ I replied. At the weigh-in, me and Billy had no idea who we were looking for, but after peering about a bit we got some sense out of someone who said this Quiros was a bit taller than me so we knew we were looking around for someone who might have been about five-nine. Lads were waiting to get weighed and I said to Billy, ‘I think that’s him.’

  ‘Do you reckon?’ Billy answered.

  ‘I do. Bit big, isn’t he?’

  Billy was bullish, in his fashion. ‘I’m going to fucking ask him.’ He strode over. ‘Who are you fighting?’ The boxer looked unsure; who was this guy? He said he didn’t know and wasn’t sure. ‘You’re fighting Richard Hatton, aren’t you?’ The boxer tried to say he wasn’t and started scrambling for an answer. Bill came back over: ‘Yeah, I think it’s him.’ The next minute, they weighed the guy in and he was fighting someone else. We’d got it completely wrong.

  It turned out Quiros was about six foot, a big right-hand puncher and the first shot he threw was straight on my eye. Bang. He cut me and not only was it sliced open but my eye closed. He won the first round by an absolute street. I was the Inter-Continental champion and when I went back to the corner the officials said, ‘Ricky, because you’re the champion we will give you one more round but we can’t let you fight with that for much longer.’ I couldn’t see out of that eye, plonked myself on my stool and started to feel sorry for myself.

  ‘It’s over,’ I thought. ‘It’s all over.’ Billy, like every good coach, had other ideas and knew exactly what to say. ‘Come on, you’ve fucking spewed it, you. Haven’t you?’ he shouted. ‘All this talk? World champion? Fucking hell, I’ve seen another side to you tonight. You’ve fucking given in, haven’t you?’

  ‘No, no, I haven’t,’ I protested.

  ‘World champion?’ he went on. ‘You’re going fucking nowhere, son.’

  ‘Pass me that fucking gumshield and I’ll show you exactly where I’m fucking going.’ With my eye closing and still bleeding, I came out, bombing away. I couldn’t see a great deal but managed to catch Quiros with a body shot, caught him a couple more times and, although I couldn’t really see where I was throwing punches,
I knew my way around a boxing ring. I got him on the ropes, pulled his head slightly to the side and felt for his body. I thought, ‘It’s round about there, isn’t it?’ as I blindly searched out the perfect spot. I was like a surgeon who’s performed the same operation many times but doing it without being able to fully see where to make the incision. I threw the punch into his side and Quiros went down like a tree. I knew the minute he hit the deck he wasn’t getting up, and Billy jumped between the ropes and hugged me.

  ‘Don’t ever tell me that I’d quit, you fucker,’ I snapped. I was still fuming over what he’d shouted, it had pumped me up so much.

  ‘All right,’ he said, wanting me to calm down; but he’d said what he had needed to at the time. It was all psychology; Billy was clever and he could read me like a book.

  The cut kept me out of the ring for a little more than three months but when I returned, against decent Italian Giuseppe Lauri, at the York Hall in Bethnal Green in London’s East End, I was not on my own. This time, my brother Matthew made his debut on the bill.

  I had turned pro at eighteen and Matthew was carpet-fitting for my dad. He saw me going to the gym every day, chucking my bag in the boot, driving off and training and doing something that I loved. He was on his hands and knees doing the carpets every day and he couldn’t stand it. He said, ‘I’m going to turn pro. I’ll give it a go.’ That’s what he said, and it’s incredible what he went on to achieve given his outlook at the time.

  I had another new supporter, too. Although Claire and I didn’t stay together, she gave birth to our son, Campbell, who is the perfect boy and who I adore.

  There was an added air of responsibility when I was defending my WBO Inter-Continental title and challenging for the WBA equivalent against Lauri. Man City played Spurs at White Hart Lane in North London that day and, although York Hall has been packed out on many occasions, it was bursting at the seams that night. ‘Manchester, na na na,’ they sang.

  I was still learning in the ring against Lauri, and outside the ropes as well. It was one of the few times I failed the scales; for all of the times I have heard people say ‘Ricky Hatton has trouble with his weight’, I can count on two or three fingers the number of times I didn’t make it. This was one of them. I just left it a little bit too late – well, I left it to the last minute, if I’m honest. I had to go for a run and have a hot bath, but by struggling a bit more than usual, I overcompensated with my eating. Whereas I would normally get in the ring at eleven stone or eleven-one, that night I got in the ring weighing about eleven-five. That might not sound like a significant amount – I’m not superstitious either – but I could feel it and definitely noticed the difference.

  I couldn’t get out of the blocks as quickly and my reactions seemed that bit slower, but that’s what you learn as you go through championship fights. You learn as you go on. In that condition and feeling that way, I had to learn when to go hard and when to take my foot off the gas. Consequently he caught me with a few more shots than I’d have liked but I still managed to get to the Italian in five rounds, and to beat another international champion like that was good form. I now knew that my best weight on fight night was eleven stone.

  The night was tarnished when there was a bit of trouble after the bout. Of all the fights in my career over the years, and with the number of fans that were eventually following me, there was very rarely any kind of trouble. The crowds were growing. I had fought in the USA, in Germany and up and down the country, and I was on the cusp of a British title shot. People were now sitting up and taking notice, and I wasn’t doing badly for a lad who never took an exam and left Hattersley High School without a qualification.

  I’d be mortified if my son, Campbell, was the same though. How I am with him is how I am with the young fighters I train now. You can’t always put an old head on young shoulders – eventually they will always do what they want – but when I’m in the gym, there’s so much I can pass on but, as much as I’m aware of that, I can also share what I did wrong. I instruct young fighters to slip the shots, catch the shots on their gloves, not to lead with a body shot. Jab first, move their head in case the counter comes in – stuff that I didn’t take much notice of when I was fighting. If any of my lads have a few weeks off and they come back in, I say ‘Jump on the scales, let’s see where you are’, when I wouldn’t go anywhere near them in between my fights. Then, if they say they haven’t got a fight lined up and don’t need to be on the weight, I say, ‘I don’t care, I don’t want you too far above. I want three pounds off by next week.’

  I’m like that with Campbell outside the ring. Campbell’s done some football, some rugby, some cricket, but the boxing is what he’s stuck with and I can really see myself in him. He will say, ‘Dad, can we do the pads, can we do this or that,’ and I reply, ‘No, you must do your homework first.’

  ‘Oh, but, Dad . . . I’ll do my homework after.’

  ‘No you won’t. You’ll do your homework first, then we’ll do the pads.’

  Homework? For me, I was always in detention for never doing any homework. I still see some of my old teachers once in a while today, whether it’s at a City game or a local restaurant and they always remind me that I was no trouble but a right lazy bastard. I was only interested in boxing; I’d done so well as an amateur, winning several schoolboy titles, and when you’re boxing at that level they don’t announce you by your club, they announce you by your school. So I was Richard Hatton, from Hattersley High School, and my school was getting a mention in the local paper. The head teacher at Hattersley, Mr Leyland, was really into the boxing, and although he never watched my fights he used to put my certificates in the hall when I won the schoolboy championships. He would mention me in assembly if I’d won anything. I’ve since done some motivational speeches at local schools because my old school has since been knocked down.

  I want Campbell to really knuckle down; his test and exam results at school have been improving all the time, the teachers are raving about him and it makes me feel dead proud. He’s got other interests away from school but just in case he doesn’t become a boxer or the next Noel Gallagher, he’s not forgetting his schoolwork. Jobs are hard to come by these days so you need your education behind you. You don’t want your children to make the same mistakes you did, and because I made so many mistakes it’s easy for me to make sure he doesn’t. Campbell is a great kid and well behaved, but what you do in school sets the tone for what you’re going to do in the rest of your life.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Title Charge

  There was a roar around Wembley Arena. A sense of anticipation that told me I was in deep trouble as the warm blood began to spill into my left eye. We were just ten seconds into the bout.

  It’s fair to say the battle with Jon Thaxton at the Wembley Arena made me the fighter I became. Jon had just clipped me with a little right hook and the next minute my eye was pouring with blood. I couldn’t have got off to a worse start. I thought I was going to beat Jon, but stop him? Maybe not. Thaxton, who came from Norwich, was always in shape and as tough as nails, as hard as they come. This was supposed to be my big night, my coming-of-age night, and the looks on the faces of people at ringside suggested to me my big night wouldn’t last much longer. The script was nearly torn up as badly as my left eye, which Thaxton had split with almost the first punch he threw. It was a massive cut, one that would later require plastic surgery, and we were only about fifteen seconds into a twelve-round fight – my first twelve-round fight at that.

  When you get cut in the first round of a twelve-round title fight you think, ‘Fucking hell.’ I went back to the corner and said, ‘How is it, Mick?’

  ‘Have you been cut before?’ he asked, knowing full well the answer and doing his bit of in-ring psychology.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘You knew you were going to get cut again, so stop whinging about it and get on with the fighting. Concentrate on the fight.’ Well, that told me.

  I carried on, typica
lly a bit reckless, and the blood was flowing. Mick was able to stop it for a while until it started again in about round seven. Mick was brilliant. An experienced referee would always be more understanding if you were badly cut but had him in the corner, because they knew all about what ‘Mick the Rub’ could do between rounds.

  I was hitting Thaxton with some almighty shots, and the amount of punishment he took was horrendous. I’m convinced that every time he sat on his stool he was tempted to think, ‘Bloody hell, I’ve had enough here.’ Then he’d peer up, see my face covered in blood and it would give him a second wind. He’d think, ‘That doesn’t look too clever, does it? I’ll give it another round.’ I was watching him between rounds, thinking, ‘Jon, will you just fuck off ?’

  He wasn’t going anywhere, though. In some rounds, when the cut started to pour, I was worried but Mick was doing such a great job; it was only in the last three rounds that it really started opening again. Paul Thomas was the referee and I thought if he’d stopped it so late, with me well on top, it would have been harsh on me.

  It was a good fight with Jon. A really good fight and an acid test for me; it taught me a lot about how far I could go. It ticked a lot of boxes, answering some of the many questions the critics always seemed to have: ‘Has he got the heart for a tough fight?’ they asked. ‘Is he still going to have it when he goes in the trenches? Has he got the ability to show he can box a bit because he’s knocking everyone out with body shots? Can he box, get out of trouble and come back if he needs to? Has he got the will?’

  Before Thaxton, the most I had ever boxed was six rounds. Once I’d done six, I instantly asked myself, ‘Can I do twelve?’ Until I did it the first time I never knew for sure that I could last. Then, the minute I put my first twelve rounds in the bag, I knew it was there, that I could last the course. It gave me more confidence, as I was no longer stepping into the unknown. The training I did with Billy was always full-on, but until I actually got that first twelve rounds under my belt, I just didn’t know for sure. And it’s not as if people didn’t ask the question of me. I would often hear, ‘Oh he’s past six rounds. Is his stamina going to be all right?’ But I was like a train.