Ricky Hatton

Bio

Right then, there is no way to write about Ricky Hatton without writing about Manchester. He was Hyde, he was blue, he was thirty thousand people singing Blue Moon in the MGM Grand at two in the morning. No British fighter has ever taken a crowd with him the way Hatton did.

The record reads 45-3 with 32 knockouts, and the peak of it was the night in June 2005 when he took Kostya Tszyu's IBF light welterweight title, breaking a great champion down over eleven relentless rounds until Tszyu stayed on his stool. Make no mistake, that is one of the two or three best performances a British fighter has ever produced on home soil.

He fought Floyd Mayweather in 2007 and Manny Pacquiao in 2009, the two best fighters of the era, and came up short in both. He was never a man who protected a record. He fought whoever was in front of him and he fought them at a pace that most people could not have sustained for three rounds, let alone twelve.

The style was pressure and body punching, and the left hook to the liver was the shot everybody knew was coming and nobody could stop. If you know, you know: Hatton at 140lb was as good as Britain has produced at the weight.

After retiring he trained fighters, including unbeaten Essex cruiserweight John Hedges. Hatton died at his home in Greater Manchester on 14 September 2025, aged 46. British boxing has not really felt the same since.