The Boxing Scene

Ricky Hatton in Las Vegas: Dreams versus Reality

Sometimes dreams and reality coincide. And sometimes, they don’t. Ricky Hatton in Las Vegas: Dreams versus Reality E very so often,” essayist Arthur Krystal writes, “two men arise with differently cast minds representing different constituencies, who capture the attention of people not normally disposed to view a fight. Perhaps each battler embodies the interested spectator’s own hopes of how the world works.” On December 8, Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Ricky Hatton met in the last big fight of 2007. The differences between them and their constituencies were self-evident. Mayweather looks like a sleek high-powered precision fighting machine unscathed by the ravages of his trade. Undefeated in thirty-nine fights, he’s boxing’s reigning pound-for-pound king and brings to mind the words of Tommy Loughran, who proclaimed, “They have to hit me to hurt me, and they can’t hit me.” Tim Keown of ESPN the Magazine calls Mayweather, “the most cartoonishly self-absorbed boxer in the world.” Once known as “Pretty Boy Floyd,” the fighter now refers to himself as “Money Mayweather.” That sobriquet is founded on Floyd’s victory over Oscar De La Hoya earlier this year in a fight that engendered 2.4 million pay-per-view buys for a domestic gross of $134 million. “Money Mayweather” now fantasizes about “the Mayweather brand” and the future of Mayweather Promotions , which he hopes will become a Fortune 500 company. “Skills pay the bills,” he says. Mayweather has been trying to reinvent himself lately, or at least change his image from that of a serial abuser of women to a good family man and charitable benefactor. He also sought to enter the mainstream of American culture earlier this year with an appearance on Dancing with the Stars. “You got twenty million people watching Dancing with the Stars,” Floyd explained. “My goal is to make some of them boxing “ fans and Floyd Mayweather Jr. fans so they’ll buy my fights. That’s the businessman in me.” Thereafter, Mayweather’s image took a hit when a profanity-laced video featuring MF (Money Floyd) surfaced on YouTube. It wasn’t the image that Mayweather was seeking to create on Dancing with the Stars. Hatton, by contrast, has pale skin that accentuates every bump and bruise on his face. His fighting heart is visible in the scars around his eyes. Prior to meeting Mayweather, he was undefeated in 43 fights and had staked a claim to being boxing’s best 140-pound fighter (7 pounds beneath the contract weight for his challenge against Floyd). Mayweather tells everyone what a great guy he is. Hatton shows them. Ray Hatton (Ricky’s father) has a memory of his son that’s instructive. “As a boy,” Ray recalls, “Richard liked to play on the slide in the playground. He always waited his turn with the other children; he never jumped the queue. But he never let anybody cut in line ahead of him either. It was a mistake to try that.” Ricky dropped out of school at age fifteen and worked briefly as a fitter and salesman at a small carpet shop owned by his parents. “He was terrible at both jobs,” his mother, Carol, remembers. “But he was good at sports. We would have preferred Richard to be a footballer. But it was his choice and he chose boxing.” Hatton has spent his entire life in Manchester, England, and the city holds him dear to its collective heart. Most ordinary people want to be treated like stars. Ricky is a star who wants to be treated like ordinary people . His parent’s house is visible from the backyard of his own. His six-yearold son, Campbell, goes to the same local school that Ricky went to as a boy. He has a self-effacing sense of humor and turns onlookers into fans wherever he goes. “Before I fought Kostya Tszyu,” Ricky recalls, “I was doing roadwork and the police stopped me to find out why someone was running down the road at two o’clock in the morning. Then they recognized me and one of them said, ‘My God, it’s Ricky Hatton.’ I told him, ‘Of course, it’s Ricky Hatton. What other dickhead would be out running at two o’clock in the morning?’ ” Unlike Mayweather, who seems to consider himself the center of the universe , Hatton regards himself as one person in a larger community. For Floyd, the trappings of success are bling, wads...