Just kidding......but Mayweather certainly broke him mentally as well as physically. Oh well talk big get that ass spanked: Battered and bleary eyed - but Hatton will be back Hungover and suffering from a broken heart, Ricky Hatton gave himself a beating under the glare of the world's press, reports Kevin Mitchell Kevin Mitchell in Las Vegas Monday December 10, 2007 Guardian Unlimited The struggle for dignity in the face of public humiliation has always been one of boxing's toughest asks. Typically, Ricky Hatton did his best in a sparse room in the bowels of the MGM Grand Arena, the morning after the terrible night before. And he just about managed it. There was a stitched wound, embellished in contusion blue, around his right eyebrow. His stare was blank, slightly confused. His hands fiddled distractedly with his mobile phone as another message came up on the screen. Hatton read it and managed a weak smile. "Good luck, eh? Hah!" It was too late for encouragement, time for some hardball analysis and a little sober reflection on the worst night of his boxing life. Maybe sober isn't the right word. "I... I, ya know... I feel a bit of a mug, for losin' me rag," he slurred through lips that had been wrapped around several glasses of something considerably stronger than water in the long hours after he'd been sat on his backside by the best fighter in the world. He was suffering from a broken heart and heavy sleep deprivation; grounds enough to talk like a train had just run over his head. But he did 'lose his rag'. Cortez, it should be remembered, didn't throw the left hook that knocked him down and out of the picture. Hatton claimed not to want to whine. "I don't want to sound like a cracked record," he said, before going on to do just that. Guinness will do that to you. "I'm not saying the referee lost me the fight, because the better man won." And then there was too long a gap in the questioning and Ricky let himself down. Cortez, he said, was "wank". Under pressure outside the ring, leading up to the big night and in defeat, he indulged himself in the sort of industrial language acceptable back in his local, but disconcerting for the over-sensitive Americans who'd come to love him. We ought not be as hard on him as he was on himself, though. His overly attentive PR man, Paul Speak, maybe meant well in trying to usher him away from the inquisition, but he inspired the hungover fighter to turn on him at one point and shout, "you're really pissing me off Paul!" Hatton shrugged his minder off and carried on with a rambling version of the night's proceedings. It was an unpretty spectacle. Reporters who'd normally queue up for any sniff of controversy shifted uneasily. We wanted to let him go. He ran through his excuses again and again, all the time paying tribute to Mayweather for doing "exactly what I would have done. I'm no Mother Theresa in the ring." The beating Hatton gave himself now was every bit as painful, in a deeper and maybe more permanent way, as that handed out by Mayweather, who turned back the fighter's high-octane but predictable onslaught, as well as the boorishness of those drunks among the 4,000 Hatton supporters in the 16,500 crowd in the hotel's Garden Arena. The moment Hatton hit the canvas - left-hooked back to reality, in the 10th round - the confirmation that we were in the presence of a rare talent was rammed home to the gathering and the victim. In the previous few rounds, Hatton had been reduced to a bit-part in Mayweather's grander piece of theatre, that of establishing his credentials as one of the best pound-for-pound fighters since Sugar Ray Leonard. That he did, as well as clawing back some personal credibility by his magnanimous acclamation of Hatton's bravery. Hatton went for a scan after the fight and was cleared. But his brain was still fuzzy, and he was running on the last reserves of the adrenalin that had driven him on the night before. No, he probably would not fight at welterweight again, but, yes, he would be back. 'Nobody wants to go out like this,' he says, 'Nobody. Not knocked on your arse like that. Nobody....'
