By Chris Stein: Taking up his ever-growing cause to fight former super lightweight/welterweight champion Ricky Hatton a notch, WBC super lightweight champion Junior Witter (36-1-2, 21 KOs) has reportedly offered to fight Hatton for free, saying “My people have got to get paid, my training expenses have got to be paid but I’ll do it for free.” I seriously doubt that his offer will have any effect on Hatton, for he’s not even remotely interested in taking on Witter, no matter what he offers.
I’d be willing to guess that Hatton still wouldn’t fight Witter even if he were to personally offer to give him his entire fight purse if they were to meet. You can look at that in one of two ways: Either Hatton sees Witter as a blow hard, an entirely dis-likable person that he doesn’t want to ever help by fighting or Hatton is afraid to fight him. With Witter now saying he’ll take nothing to fight Hatton, this essentially blows out of the water Hatton’s excuse about not wanting to fight him in order not to help him.
If Witter is at all serious about this offer, then Hatton has nothing to worry about by fighting Witter, since there’s no way that Witter can be helped financially by fighting Hatton. Of course, there is, that is if Witter should turn around and beat Hatton, which is something that more than a few boxing scribes have been speculating about in the recent months. Then again, if Hatton is in fact afraid of Witter, as he thinks he is, then I doubt that there’s anything that Witter can do to get him in the ring. Hatton simply won’t take the risk, thinking internally that he couldn’t measure up against Witter and would only risk making a fool of himself like he did in his bout with Floyd Mayweather Jr. in December 2007.
To be sure, Witter has a crafty way of fighting that is somewhat similar to that of Mayweather, only he’s a little less powerful overall. However, Witter’s punches are so fast and hard to predict where they’re coming from, that it makes him much more dangerous a fighter. Quite certainly, Hatton can’t go on avoiding a fight with Witter, for it appears to be having a withering effect on Hatton’s reputation in the boxing world. At first, when Witter initially started calling Hatton out years ago, it didn’t get much attention since Hatton and Witter weren’t all that well known on the world stage.
However, in the last two years, both fighters have become much more popular and are known throughout the world. Witter’s challenges are no longer being contained within the UK, they’re now reverberating around the world thanks to the internet. For those people who can read English, they see Witter’s challenges to Hatton in bold print on almost a daily basis, all without a reply from Hatton. He may think that he can go on ignoring these challenges forever, but by doing so Hatton is eroding his own reputation because Witter isn’t some kind of low quality fighter that you can ignore. Just the opposite, in fact.
Witter hasn’t been beaten in eight years since losing a 12-round unanimous decision to the then IBF super lightweight champion Zab Judah. This was Judah at the top of his game, before he’d been stopped by Kostya Tszyu, yet Witter gave him tremendous problems in the fight due to his handspeed, unorthodox punches and ring movement. Hatton, as good a slugger as he is, would have been hard pressed to perform as good as Witter did back then.
At some point, Hatton is going to have to snap out of it, and grow some courage and accept Witter’s challenge regardless of the circumstances.