Ricky Hatton - Interesting article

https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/article/ricky-hatton-boxing-suicide-drinking-drugs-3jd39sm2f

 

It must be just in England because there is no paywall here in the US.

 

Unfortunately, you miss a lot of great pics, but here it is. And for those of you who know how to bypass a paywall, the link is above.

I meet Ricky Hatton in Hyde, the Greater Manchester town where the former welterweight now runs a boxing gym. He grew up on the nearby Hattersley council estate, stayed local and, over the years, has never really left. During the good times, when he was winning world title belts and multimillion-pound purses, he remained rooted to his home town. This was always part of his appeal. He played Thursday night darts in the local pub, turned out for his Sunday league football team, bantered with the market stall holders and the people he’d pass on the street. He was “the pride of Hyde”, and everyone knew him and everyone loved him. “I was this bubbly, larger than life character,” he says. “And hopefully, you know, fun to be around.”

During the bad times, when he stopped winning and became overweight, depressed and suicidal, he remained in Hyde. After one particular high-profile defeat — a 2009 loss in Las Vegas to Manny Pacquiao — he came home but felt unable to look the people he’d once joked with in the eye. This intense self-consciousness gave way to paranoia. “I’d be walking down the street thinking, ‘They’re all laughing at me. They’re all laughing at me.’ ” He would pass whole days in isolation, holed up. “I’d sit in the house, feeling depressed, having a bit of a cry, watching TV and ordering takeaways,” he says. “I was in a total daze.”

There were times when he would take a knife and attempt to summon the courage to end it all. “I tried killing myself. But I couldn’t do it,” he says, shaking his head. “Couldn’t do it. So I thought, ‘I’ll just drink myself to death.’ ”

With this goal in mind, Hatton fell into a routine of regular, heavy bingeing. “I’d get up, then wait for the clock to hit 12, maybe 1 o’clock. And then I’d just call at the pub.” Having once walked tall around Hyde, he now drifted about the place like a spectre: furtive, ashamed and in search of oblivion. His friends did their best to curtail his excesses, but to little avail. When they pointedly stopped going for big nights out in Manchester, Hatton would just climb into a cab and go into town on his own. And having won a passionately loyal fanbase during his career — tens of thousands of his supporters travelled to Vegas to watch his fights, the vast majority without tickets — there was never any shortage of people to drink with. Or, as was increasingly the case, take drugs with. In September 2010, pictures of Hatton snorting cocaine made the cover of the News of the World. He was in a Manchester hotel on that occasion, but to be honest, he says, he could have been anywhere. “At the time, I didn’t have a clue. Didn’t remember it. Didn’t know where I was, who I was with, what I was doing. Nights like that happened so often,” he says, matter-of-factly. “That thing in the paper could have happened umpteen times. I just didn’t care.”


Hatton knocked out by Manny Pacquiao, Las Vegas, 2009. “I was never again going to get the rush of hearing, ‘There’s only one Ricky Hatton’ ”
PA
During these often days-long benders, he says he would sometimes find himself sitting alone in the corner with a drink and quietly weeping, or buttonholing strangers and telling them that he planned to end his life. “The amount of people I must have told I was going to kill myself,” he says, frowning at the memory. Eventually friends would come to find him and drag him home. Or strangers would help him into a cab. He was a pitiable sight, and on some level he knew it. “To see me as I was — I bet there’s a few who must have shed a tear.” Through his own skill and tenacity in the ring, he had won fame, fortune and a level of popularity most sportspeople never come close to. But now, barely into his thirties, he was disintegrating. “So many people must have thought, ‘How’s he ended up like that?’ ”

So, how did he end up like that? And how did he manage to piece himself back together? Hatton, as you may have already begun to conclude, is not squeamish about discussing his past, or shy about dissecting the psychological impact of his rise and fall as a fighter. Which, when it comes to answering these two big questions, is helpful. It also helps that he is, by temperament, a talker: not garrulous or a bore, but rather someone who can tell a story in an engaging fashion. He mimes combinations he threw in the ring. He does the occasional funny voice. He’s only 44, but sounds older, his voice thick and throaty, his turn of phrase sometimes quaint, almost from another age.

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The same could be said of his values. Hatton made good money during his career and, unlike some boxers, looked after it well. But he is materially modest. Today, sitting beside one of the sparring rings in his gym, only a decent-sized watch hints at wealth. He says that, when he bought his first expensive car, he couldn’t bring himself to drive it through Hattersley. “I didn’t want people saying, ‘Look at that tosser!’ ”

He compares himself, at my prompting, with Floyd Mayweather Jr, the brash, trash-talking American boxer responsible for Hatton’s first professional defeat. “He goes on TV, calling himself ‘Money’ Mayweather, boasting about his watches and chains,” he says, his voice rising in pitch. “And I’m worried about driving me car through the estate! If I walked into the local pub in Hattersley and started telling people how much my watches cost, they’d stick a pot in me throat,” he says, by which he means people would smash a pint glass in his face.

Ricky Hatton and Floyd Mayweather Jr at the weigh-in for their world welterweight fight, 2007
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He is about to be the subject of a new, feature-length documentary, Hatton. It is excellent: less a straight boxing documentary than a fable about what can happen when a fundamentally straightforward person finds themselves having to navigate an increasingly complex world of money, success and, eventually, failure. Hatton, we learn, grew up in a respectable working-class family. His parents, Carol and Ray, were business-minded people, and ran a local carpet shop as well as a number of pubs over the years. Hatton found his way into boxing as a schoolboy: the documentary features footage of him as a charismatic little bruiser, demolishing his opponent in the carpeted back rooms of pubs and clubs. The sport seemed to unlock something within him. “The first time you get punched in the face, you either like it or you don’t,” he says. Hatton liked it. Or at least, he liked the feeling of repaying the punch with interest. He told his teachers that he was going to be a world champion, and they smiled and nodded.

 

Wearing a “Ricky Fatton” suit before his junior welterweight match against Paulie Malignaggi, 2008
AP

But boxing as a teenage amateur, he began to develop a reputation as an aggressive, exciting fighter capable of unleashing incredibly powerful body shots. He came into the orbit of a local boxing trainer known as Billy “the Preacher” Graham, a somewhat eccentric figure known for keeping snakes and monkeys in his top-floor tower-block flat, but who discerned something in the young Hatton. “The hair on the back of my neck stood up,” Graham remembers of their first sparring session in Hatton. Before long,he was training Hatton, who would turn professional at 18. Hatton describes the “massive self-belief” he had during this period, and how he and Graham would stay up late, talking for hours and planning his ascent to greatness. Many people at the time considered this delusional. “They didn’t think I had the star quality to reach the very top,” he says. Yes, he was entertaining to watch. But his defence was patchy and, at some point, he’d run into someone who could outbox him and that would be that. That kind of talk, he says, “used to be my fuel”.

• Ricky and Campbell Hatton on depression and returning to the ring

And, in movie-montage fashion, he continued to win fight after fight, powered by his self-belief, physical courage and the faith that Graham had invested in him. His reputation grew, he won domestic titles as well as a growing number of fans, who were attracted not just to his hard-hitting style in the ring, but his hard-drinking image outside it. During his career, Hatton fought as either a welterweight or light-welterweight, which means his fighting weight was around 10st. In the months between bouts, though, he was capable of hitting 14st, earning him the nickname “Ricky Fatton” — which, of course, he embraced. Today, he says that if any of the fighters he trains — including his 22-year-old son, Campbell, a promising lightweight — did what he had done, he would kick them out of the gym. “If they ballooned like I did, they’d be out the door,” he says, gesturing forcibly towards the exit.



On the shoulders of his trainer, Billy Graham, after his fight against WBA welterweight world champion Luis Collazo in Boston, 2006
REUTERS



But he doesn’t regret his fluctuating weight, or the pub and curry sessions that contributed to it.

“I needed to do it because that’s how I was built. I felt I needed to blow off steam and spend a bit of time with my mates. If I did all that training, then just had a week off and [only] a few pints and was then back at it again, I don’t think I’d have been the fighter I was.”

In the summer of 2005, Hatton announced himself to the world by defeating Kostya Tszyu, who had been the reigning light-welterweight champion for much of the previous decade. Although regarded by all as the significant underdog, Hatton overcame the Australian in front of 22,000 baying fans at the Manchester Evening News Arena. They chanted his name. He and Graham wept in the ring. He dived into the ringside seats to embrace his parents and girlfriend, a teacher named Jennifer Dooley. He had made good on those schoolboy boasts.

“The best drug you can ever have is having your hands raised in front of thousands of fans singing, ‘There’s only one Ricky Hatton,’ ” he says, trying not to smile. “It’s quite a selfish sport, boxing. Don’t think bad of me, but when you win, you’re not sharing it with ten team-mates. You get all the accolades.”

At this point, Hatton was undefeated in his professional career. But for all his belief in himself as a fighter, he says that, as a person, “I was very, very weak.” This is a theme that, over the course of our time together, he keeps returning to: a psychological fragility that would ultimately contribute to his downfall. What he lacked, he believes, was confidence in himself as an individual. “I always thought there was this gene in me: a little bit of weakness there. A little bit of lack of confidence,” he says. “Confidence was always a bad thing for me.”

When he says, “Don’t think bad of me,” he means it. Hatton does not like the idea a stranger thinking ill of him. He doesn’t use the word, but what he describes is a general feeling of insecurity. This, he admits, is what drew him to boxing in the first place. But boxing masked it, rather than vanquished it, in the same way that drinking probably masked it without ever making it go away. In Hatton, Dooley, now his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his two daughters (his eldest child Campbell’s mum is an old girlfriend, Claire Lord), describes how he has a need to be loved. “Not just loved,” she says, “but wanted and accepted.”

 

With his son Campbell, also a boxer, in 2021
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I ask if he agrees with her analysis. “Totally,” he says. It’s what caused him to never drive his car through Hattersley. It’s what caused him to fret inordinately when his mates would gently rib him by calling him “superstar” and complain that they only ever see him on TV these days. “They were proud of me,” he says, because it’s so obvious now. “But I was thinking, ‘God, do they think I’m Billy Big Spuds?’ So I felt the need to go to the pub, even if I was just on orange juice. It shouldn’t be like that. But that’s how I felt.” During the height of his career, Hatton once said, “What’s the point of winning world titles if everyone thinks you’re a tosser?” Which is, I think, as close to an encapsulation of his personality as you can get.

In December 2007, Hatton fought Mayweather Jr in Las Vegas, taking somewhere north of 30,000 fans with him. His opponent was in almost every way his opposite: a fighter who seemed to revel in his pantomime villain unpopularity, who traded on an obnoxious, ostentatious public persona, but who was an unmatched technical boxer and master of defence. And, for the first time in his career, Hatton lost. Mayweather is regarded as one of the best pound-for-pound boxers to have ever lived, so there should be no shame in losing to him. But for Hatton, this defeat began a process of destabilisation.

“That lack of confidence went into overdrive,” he says. The thing that made people love him — his ability to win boxing matches — was suddenly gone. And if they loved him when he won, then that must mean, he convinced himself, they hated him when he lost. Other victories followed, but a second high-profile loss in Las Vegas to Pacquiao — like Mayweather, another all-time great — effectively finished Hatton’s career.

“All of a sudden, you get beat by Manny Pacquiao. And you think, there’s no boxing no more. I’m never going to hear, ‘There’s only one Ricky Hatton,’ again. I’m never going to feel that walk into the ring and the nervous tension where you feel you’re on the edge of a cliff, which is the scariest thing about boxing but the thing you miss the most. The adrenaline rush. That kick.”

So he sought to lose himself in drinking. And, as if to add to his despondency, some of his closest relationships began to crumble. His trainer, Billy “the Preacher” Graham, had been jettisoned after the Mayweather defeat. But now he was claiming that he was still owed more than £1 million by Hatton, who was managed by his father, Ray. Caught in the middle of an acrimonious dispute between the two men he loved most, an occasional cocaine habit became an increasingly regular one. A court case ensued, which would end with Hatton and Graham reaching a settlement, but over the course of which Hatton discovered that his own father had been keeping money in an account of which Hatton himself had no knowledge. This was, Ray says in the documentary, a “discretionary trust” set up as a means of safeguarding Hatton’s finances. He also insists that he had tried to explain to his son that he’d done this. But for Hatton, it was too much, and he would spend the next eight years estranged from his parents.



With Liam and Noel Gallagher, above, and, below, David Beckham after defeating Paulie Malignaggi in Las Vegas in 2008
AP









“I fell out with everybody,” he says. “Me and Billy fell out. Then me and my mum and dad fell out. And then me missus left,” he continues, meaning Dooley. They had two daughters, Millie and Fearne, in quick succession. But by 2016, they were separated, Dooley feeling unable to help him as he struggled with depression, drink and an obsessive focus on his parents’ betrayal, real or imagined. “It was a choice between peace and chaos,” she says tearfully in Hatton.

“I wanted to kill myself every day,” he says. His nadir came one night when, having tried to find the will to cut his wrists, he started to have what he thought was a heart attack. “I phoned an ambulance. Ambulance took me to the hospital and they said, ‘You’re not having a heart attack; you’re having a panic attack.’ ”

It was an episode that prompted him to seek professional help. “I went and saw a psychiatrist. I knocked on the door, fell on my knees, started crying and said, ‘You’ve got to help me. I’m going to kill myself. I’m not going to make it to next week. If you don’t tell me what to do today, I am going to kill myself, 100 per cent.’ ”

He had reached, he says today, his capacity for pain. “I thought to myself, I can’t take any more pain. I can’t take any more heartache. I want to sort it out now.”

And, gradually, he did. For the pastfew years he has been in good physical and mental shape. What he finds works for him is keeping his life simple. “Keep yourself busy. Do what makes you happy. When I’m feeling down, I just get my phone out and look at pictures of my kids. If I’m feeling bad, I put Oasis on. Or go to the gym. Or go into the garage and do six or seven rounds on the bag,” he says. His son Campbell is now a father himself, which means Hatton has a grandchild he can pop round and visit. Last year, at 43, he fought in an exhibition match against former world champion Marco Antonio Barrera in Manchester, which required him to get back into shape. He has, more or less, kept himself trim ever since. “No beer belly any more,” he says. “Every night I must have 20 people coming up to me saying, ‘Looking well, Rick! Looking well.’ Because they’ve seen how bad I was.”

He still drinks, but in relative moderation. He can go to the pub, watch a Man City match, enjoy “three or four pints” and then go home in a way that would have once been impossible. He has also begun a somewhat tentative reconciliation with his mother and father. “Which I’d never have been able to do if I wasn’t in the right place,” he says. “I’m 44. While I’m not ready for my pipe and slippers, I remember going to lots of weddings and 21st birthday parties. Now, it seems to be funerals. Life’s too short. Let’s move on. Let’s put the past behind us.”

Reflecting on his boxing career, Hatton says his biggest achievement was being able to amass such a large and passionate fanbase. “How can that not be your greatest accomplishment?” he asks. “Because it’s nice to have the house and it’s nice to have the car and it’s nice to have the belts. But the love of the fans? When they come up to me and go, ‘Hey Ricky, remember this? Remember that?’ it makes me feel proud.”

He still has a need to feel loved and liked and accepted. But perhaps that’s not the great weakness he used to think it was. At any rate, he seems to understand, now, that his fans didn’t just love him because he was very good. They loved him because he was him.

“I used to be depressed that I’d never hear that roar of the crowd again. And in an ideal world, I’d love to go back 20 years and be lifting world title belts in Vegas. But that’s never going to happen again. Them days can’t last for ever. They’ve been; they’ve gone. Happy days,” he says, smiling. “I cherish them. But I’ve never been as happy as I am now.”
Hatton airs on Sky Documentaries and Now on August 31




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