Ricky Hatton has been casting his mind back over his storied career.
Hatton is a British boxing legend who fought between 1997 and 2012. ‘The Hitman’ held several world titles across his career including in the light welterweight and welterweight division.
Ring Magazine named him Fighter of the Year in 2005 which was the year he had his most famous win against Kostya Tszyu. In forcing his Aussie opponent to retire on his stool he picked up the IBF, Ring and Lineal titles and added the WBA belt to his collection later the same year with a win over Carlos Maussa.
The Manchester favourite also took on the mighty duo of pound-for-pound greats Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao in super fights in Las Vegas. Both ended in knockout defeats that Hatton has since admitted he found hard to take while also saying that Mayweather was better fighter of the two.
However, now speaking to talkSPORT Boxing, he has revealed that neither of those legends gave him his hardest fight.
Instead, he has gone for a 12-round battle with Luis Collazo for the WBA welterweight title in May 2006.
“That was my toughest fight. I mean, getting beat by Pacquiao like I did was very tough to come to terms with and Floyd Mayweather was just technically so good. From a physical point of view [Collazo was tougher]. I never made fights easy for myself. I was always going to have it out with someone.”
“I’m 5ft 6in. I’m not tall for junior welterweight. So, to move up to welterweight… Billy Graham, my trainer, said, ‘No, don’t do it, Rick. Don’t do it.’ But I wanted to do what my heroes had done. I wanted to try to become a world champion in two weight divisions.”
Though Hatton scored a knockout in the first 10 seconds of the fight, it ended up going the distance and Hatton reflected on the toll it took on him as well as his loss of power having moved up the weights.
“I think it was only the knockdown that won it. The people that I could bully at 10 stone. When I got close, I could push them, shove them all. I couldn’t do it at 10st 7lbs. I hit him, and the shots just bounced off him. I went to shove him back and he didn’t move. I thought, ‘Oh this is going to be a long night. It was the worst I’ve felt after a fight. I had hot sweats, shaky, shivering and I couldn’t even go to the afterparty I was in such a bad way,”
Hatton finally hung up the gloves after a knockout loss to Vyacheslav Senchenko at the Manchester Arena in 2012.
