War and Peace: My Story Read online

  To Jennifer, Campbell, Millie and Fearne

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1 In the Beginning

  2 Learning a Trade

  3 Turning Pro

  4 The Title Charge

  5 The WBU Reign

  6 Destiny

  7 Made in America

  8 Mayweather

  9 Rebuilding

  10 Pacquiao

  11 Depression

  12 The Lowest Ebb

  13 Redemption

  14 Being Happy

  Illustrations

  PROLOGUE

  It was not supposed to end this way.

  I was in the Manchester Arena and the fans were singing my name. That part was right, at least.

  They chortled ‘Walking in a Hatton Wonderland’ with the same vigour and passion that they always had, and as I left the prize ring for the final time they cheered and applauded.

  My face was black and blue and swelling rapidly, and I had lost for just the third time in my career.

  They always say that comebacks are ill-advised but I never did listen to them much. It was my life, my career, my decision.

  Although I knew it was going to be an emotional night, I could never have guessed exactly how incredible and unique it would turn out to be. You have to be a professional boxer to actually appreciate what it means to come out to a crowd of 20,000 raucous fans like that. I know you have your trainer and your team behind you, but you don’t share the love with your teammates like you do in other sports; it comes all on you, only you and all at once.

  There was an eruption when I stood on the stage waiting to walk to the ring, and I prepared to hold my head high as my music, ‘Blue Moon’, kicked in.

  In that instant, I’m stood there alone and I prepare to step through the wall of noise that awaits. Walking to the ring, it’s hard work. It’s lonely, it’s isolated, and the euphoria brought on by the roar of the crowd sinks under the pressure and feelings of dread. The place comes alive. A wave of flash bulbs blast at me and the arena spotlights shine directly into my eyes. I’m blinded but steady myself, gather my thoughts and think of my girlfriend Jennifer and my children, Campbell and Millie.

  I need to hold it together. I’ve come so far. I can’t crack now. I look into the baying masses. I bite down so hard my jaw clenches and shakes. I bang my gloves together: ‘Come on, Ricky lad.’ I emerge from my personal darkness and the noise begins to fill my soul while simultaneously popping in my ears.

  It is deafening. There is no other way to describe it. It means more to me than it ever has done. Not too long ago I had been suicidal. I’d had knives at my wrists and I couldn’t get any lower. Compare that to walking out in the Manchester Arena with all of these fans screaming for me, willing me to do well. I have come a long way – it means everything to me.

  People have always asked me what my best achievement was in boxing and it was never anything to do with what I did in the ring – it was the fanbase that followed me. For somebody to have fought depression for a number of years, to hear that roar that night after more than three years away from boxing . . . I had to hold the tears back as I walked down the ramp. It sounds a little bit soppy but I just felt like dropping to my knees and saying thank you. To hear that roar one last time was more than I could have ever hoped for. I was getting teary-eyed, saying to myself, ‘Come on, Ricky, keep it together. Come on, son, you can do it.’

  The noise was somehow intensifying with every step I took. I began to think about all of the people I had let down. This whole fight was about redemption and making people proud of me again.

  Then there was my baby girl, Millie. I didn’t want her to read in the papers the rubbish my son, Campbell, had to about me and my private life. I didn’t want that. I wanted her to read about how well her dad was doing. I was also thinking about my parents, who I’d barely spoken to in two years, and how I felt I’d been let down by those people who were closest to me.

  When it came down to the actual fight, against a very good former world champion in Vyacheslav Senchenko, it was hard for me to try and channel my emotions and say, ‘This is great, this is what it’s all about.’ Beforehand I just thought the world was against me and I was just going to show everyone. I had so much fury inside me, more than I did when I fought Kostya Tszyu. The fact no one thought I could beat Tszyu, that was my fury. ‘I’m not just a ticket-seller,’ I was thinking, ‘I’ll beat him.’

  But this was different. National hero, getting flattened by Manny Pacquiao, then retiring, the personal problems that I had and all the rest of it . . . How I felt for Senchenko was, ‘What did I do to this world to have it fucking happen to me, this whole weight that seems to have fallen on my shoulders?’ Stick it all in a ball and I thought that’s what Senchenko had coming at him. ‘It’s going to be fucking painful for him,’ I thought.

  As I stood at the bottom of the ring steps, having lost four-and-a-half stone, after all the issues that I’d faced and everything I’d been through, the love the fans still had for me was incredible. It was the most emotional fight of my career, and that includes Kostya Tszyu, Floyd Mayweather and Pacquiao. That is something that will never leave me.

  I could have picked an opponent I would have flattened but I didn’t. I went straight in at the deep end and I wouldn’t do anything differently. I’ve always been a hundred-per-cent man, all or nothing, and that had not changed in my time away from the ring.

  There was something extra that night, too. An air of uncertainty that everyone bought into. Some would have been saying, ‘Why’s he coming back? He doesn’t need to.’ Cynics would think, ‘Well, we know why he’s coming back.’ But even avid fans of mine would have been sat there not having a clue what was going to happen, wondering if I was going to be the same as I was at my best. Was I going to come back better or stronger? Should I really be doing this? That added to the atmosphere. No one knew what was going to happen. When I won my first world title against Kostya Tszyu it was an electric night, but it didn’t compare to this.

  I step under the ropes and into the ring and the crowd bursts. I have never heard a noise like it. It’s gladiatorial. They want me to do well. I step onto the canvas and I can feel it shaking and vibrating under my feet with the sound. It is unbelievable. It is priceless. I look back out at the fans, fully embracing the bond we have always shared. I glance at Senchenko. ‘You’re having it tonight,’ I think to myself. The fans clearly agree. He doesn’t look back at me. I see individual faces in the audience. They scream and sing. Some of the fans are punching the air, pulling for me. I can feel their hopes pinned on me. They have paid a lot of money to come and watch me fight. They have come to see me win. It is what they expect.

  I meet my opponent in the centre of the ring. I look at Senchenko, expressionless, hiding my nerves, disguising my anger, the fury that burns beneath and my eagerness.

  The last time I had fought I had been destroyed in two rounds by Manny Pacquiao. It’s all very well concentrating on the story away from the ring – redemption had been my mantra – but the last time I’d stepped between those ropes I’d been knocked out. Badly. Ultimately, it was not just the Pacquiao fight that sent me over the edge, it was an accumulation of things, but I was embarrassed about it and I had to face up to it now.

  I’ve never said I will be the greatest fighter ever but one thing I have always been is a very proud man and I always took on the best. So as a man, it was very hard to come to terms with that knockout. I had been heartbroken last time I had been in the ring. And now there was self-doubt, too, with a lot of people asking me if my chin was going to be able to hold up to the same punches that it could before and I read somewhere that: ‘This could be another blast out. He
’s obviously past it.’

  I didn’t want to make a dickhead out of myself. If I lost again like I did against Pacquiao then the fear of being a laughing stock comes into play, doesn’t it?

  To compound that, when I went for my boxing medical they said, ‘Ricky, your blood pressure is sky high, you’re half an inch away from having a heart attack.’ And that was even once I got my weight down, because of all the stress from everything away from boxing. I was still having problems with my mum and dad, and the last three torrid years had been a horribly dark period for so many reasons.

  My depression can be traced all the way back to the Floyd Mayweather fight in 2007, but even though I had been in training for the comeback, not drinking, doing what I needed to do, sometimes feelings don’t go away. My blood pressure was through the roof and it was worrying.

  Still, after eight rounds against Senchenko I think I was winning. Not everyone does, but I’ve watched it back and believe I was winning a close, hard scrap.

  I’m a boxing historian and I have listened to old fighters who have turned round and said, ‘We’ll give it one more go.’ And in the gym, in sparring, the padwork and the training, I was in no doubt that I was going to be better than I ever had been in my life. That’s what those old fighters said, too.

  I was sharp, feeling fast and me and my trainer Bob Shannon were both thinking: ‘Jeez, there’s not even any ring rust.’ Training, though, is so different to the fight. The minute that bell went it was different. And after three or four rounds, I sat on my stool and thought, ‘Oh Ricky. You haven’t got it.’ Reality set in.

  Again I think of little Millie, Campbell and Jen, my new family, and so launch myself back into the fray each session, trying to make my point.

  The fight gets tougher round by round. It becomes a battle and as we take turns landing heavy shots our faces begin to tell the tale of a hard fight. It’s another violent story, another war. It’s my forty-eighth professional contest and I’ve spent the best part of fifteen years dragging my body down to the right weight. I can feel all of the miles on the clock. The fighting engine doesn’t fire like it used to. It splutters; stops and starts. That’s how I’m fighting. It is not fluid and it’s becoming painful as he starts to land long, raking blows that crunch into my face and pump my head back, jolting it so I can hear audible gasps from my crowd. That is never a good sound.

  I walk back to my corner after each round and glance down to the middle seats of the front row at ringside. For every fight previously, Mum and Dad have been there, willing me to do well. They aren’t there. Their seats are taken and it reminds me of the heartache away from the ring.

  Jen is there, Campbell is at home and Jen’s mum and dad have baby Millie. Former world champions need babysitters, too. But it just doesn’t feel the same, emotionally or physically. Everything is different.

  In the ring I wasn’t quite getting out of the way quickly enough. I wasn’t quite moving my feet away correctly; when I was throwing punches some of them were just missing by fractions and it was the little things like that. It wasn’t like it used to be. The timing, the movement. They weren’t there. So you knuckle down and try to go through with it. And you force it because it’s not coming naturally. And then that works against you. I thought, ‘If I haven’t got it, let’s just get to the final bell. Let’s just get the win and do what we’ve got to do.’

  Then, in round nine, he got me with a body shot. A left hand crunched into my side.

  It is a sickening, painful shot that captures my breath. I’m drowned of oxygen and drop to my knees. The pain in my side is severe and it bends me at the waist. I try to breathe in, at first through my nose, then through my mouth. But I can’t draw breath. I can’t breathe. When you get hit on the chin you can get up, shake it off, but they always say you can never shake a body shot off and when I fall I can hear referee Victor Loughlin counting: ‘. . . two, three . . .’.

  I’m still trying to take breaths, thinking I’m going to rise at eight. I can actually feel the crowd willing me to get up.

  Victor’s count gets to ‘. . . four, five . . .’ and I can hear the crowd really shouting for me. ‘Come on.’ My nose is not able to bring any air inside. Then it is ‘. . . six, seven . . .’ and it’s even louder. Now they’re pleading with me. ‘Come on, Ricky. Get up. Get up.’

  CHAPTER 1

  In the Beginning

  They called him Spider Hatton. His first name was Richard, too, but he was my great uncle. We have pictures of him dating back to the 1920s and he had a cherubic appearance about him, like he was too polite to wear boxing gloves. Yet by all accounts he could pack a punch and was a prominent figure on the Manchester fight scene. He was a throwback and apparently pretty good.

  My family only found that out when we looked into it after I started boxing, because we didn’t know where my talent came from. No one in my immediate family had ever boxed before. My dad, Ray, had played football for Manchester City, my grandad had played for City’s B team before the war; so when I took to boxing like a duck to water it had us all baffled. We went back through the family tree and found where I got it from – Spider Hatton, the bare-knuckle fighter. I suppose bare-knuckle would have been right up my street, wouldn’t it? He was actually my grandfather’s brother, but my grandmother’s father, Daniel, was also handy with his fists on the bare-knuckle circuit in Ireland. As with most things in this sport, reputations give birth to legends, and they said that Eileen Slattery’s husband Daniel – my great-grandfather – was one of the best.

  I wasn’t drawn to boxing when I was really young. My dad always had public houses and my mum, Carol, worked in a clothes shop in Hyde before she took on a carpet stall at Glossop market when one of my uncles died. But then I saw, and was amazed by, Bruce Lee on TV and wanted to be like him. You can guarantee that when Rocky comes on the TV every amateur gym is packed to the rafters the following night. Well, that’s what it was like with Bruce Lee. I absolutely loved his films and so started kick-boxing. I did all right with it; I was only seven or eight and was as game as they come, but with me being short and stocky you could see my talent was with my fists and not my feet. I couldn’t get near my opponents and the taller ones were kicking my teeth in. The coach said that because I was giving away so much height and reach I should give boxing a try, so I walked over the road to the Louvolite Boxing Club. Ted Peate was my first amateur coach, and I was there for the first two years of my amateur career. Within about two or three months I had my first fight.

  Boxing is one of those sports where you get whacked on the nose and you either like it or you think, ‘It’s not for me, this game.’ My first fight was an absolute war. I boxed a lad called Danny Reynolds, from Leeds, and it was toe-to-toe for three one-and-a-half-minute rounds. The crowd went mad, and if I hadn’t had a strong stomach I would have thought, ‘Sod that for a game of soldiers.’ But I loved it. I was hooked. The harder the fight, the more I loved it.

  At the Louvolite there was me, Stephen Bell and Tony Feno, two of my great friends at the time. Stephen went on to captain England as an amateur, and both would come to the big fights later in my career, but back then boxing was fun for us, we were best pals and called ourselves the Three Amigos. There are still old black and white pictures of us in the gym now. In the minibus we’d sing songs all the way down to the show, tell jokes and take the piss out of Ted. By the time we got to the show and we had to fight it was almost as if it was secondary to having a laugh with the guys; you’d expect that at a young age I suppose, we were only eleven or twelve. I loved going boxing and going to the gym, even from the start, but it was a social thing as much as a sporting thing for a while. That didn’t last too long. As the fights ticked by, and people started to tell me they thought I was pretty good, I began to take it a bit more seriously.

  Like my dad, though, and my grandad before him, I was playing football as well and I also supported Manchester City like them. I played right midfield and wasn’t bad, featuring for
my local team on the council estate in Hattersley. I went for trials with Tameside Boys, my county team, and was selected for them. By playing for Tameside I was picked up by Man City and was at the FA School of Excellence for two years. In my class at City were Jim and Jeff Whitley, who both went on to play for the club and were capped by Northern Ireland, and it always makes you wonder, could I have done it? I was okay and was always very fit because of boxing. I got up and down the pitch really well, was a good tackler and a decent passer of the ball. I was a Roy Keane-type player, always very aggressive, as you can imagine – and, as boxing keeps you thinking three or four moves ahead, I could always read the game well, pick a pass out. There were some players in my class who stood out a mile though, and I wasn’t one of them. It was also clear to anyone watching that my real talent was with my boxing and I was forever working on that.

  My dad had a pub, the New Inn in Hyde, where he built a gym in the cellar; I would spend hours down there practising punches, combinations, feints and footwork. The cellar had several small areas: if you went straight ahead and turned right there was a big room where all of the barrels were stored, beer, lager, ciders and so on; next was a little room where my boxing gym was; and through that a smaller room where all the spirits and bottled lagers would be. Then, if you came out of the gym and doubled back on yourself, by the staircase there was a long corridor that lead to three smaller rooms, where the pub football teams used to get changed before a game on a Sunday morning. There was also an extra room, full of clocks and things because there was a pigeon club at the pub. It was amazing in there, and it’s fair to say there was a broad cross-section of people who came into the New Inn.

  When I was training on a Friday night I would get people coming down to watch me now and then. The pub was supposed to be haunted, so I’d only go down there with my trainer because you believe in bad things at that age, don’t you? But I had many happy times down there. It might have been the hardest game in the world but I was a bit of an anorak, even as a kid; while other lads from school and the estate were out on their skateboards, BMXs or mountain bikes, I was down there training. I suppose that’s what you’ve got to do to reach the top, you’ve got to live it. One of the Louvolite coaches, Mick Lowan, brought his pads and came down to the cellar and spent hours and hours coaching me.