By Eric Thomas: With most people’s thoughts on this Saturday’s bout between Ricky Hatton (43-1, 31 KOs) and Juan Lazcano, a lot of the attention has seemed to have been drawn away from Hatton’s stated goal of fighting unbeaten WBC welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. in early 2009, a fight that is Hatton’s seemingly insane plan for vengeance. He appears to be dead set on making this fight happen, talking about the previous fight often, while seeing the fight through a foggy haze of a dimmed memory. As Hatton tells it, he was doing well against Mayweather in the 1st half of the fight.
Unfortunately, there are few people (other than Hatton fans) that remember him doing well at all in the early going. Perhaps there are fewer still that would like to see Hatton go up against Mayweather again for what most likely will be an even worse thumping than last time out. To be sure, Hatton seems genuine in his desire to get revenge, not just looking for another huge payday, which he’ll no doubt be getting. Last time out, he received thirty million for the fight, so I’m sure that is obviously one of his reasons for wanting to fight Mayweather a second time, though not the major reason.
Hatton seems to really believe that he can defeat Mayweather this time out, but he may have a lot of work cut out for him to try and convince a lot of fans to want to waste time in seeing him get knocked out again. Most people thought Hatton had little chance the first time out, mainly because he was considered a smaller fighter, one with crude boxing skills, known mostly for roughing up his opponents in the safe confines of Manchester stadium.
With Hatton’s size disadvantage alone, fighting in as division below Mayweather in the junior welterweight division, almost assured that he’d have problems with Mayweather’s size. However, it was more than that, in that Mayweather’s boxing skills were perhaps the best in the sport, and he’d proven himself over and over again previously against more skilled fighters than Hatton. The only thing that Hatton could to match up with Mayweather, it seemed, was for him to hope that he could somehow get away with a mugging. With the fight being fought in Las Vegas rather than Manchester, where Hatton is usually allowed to get away with all kinds of rough stuff, made it almost a given that the fight would be fought without his extra-curricular activities in the ring.
As it turns out, Hatton was cut off from his usual rough style of fighting early on by referee Joe Cortez, and with that avenue cut off, Hatton was for the most part a crippled fighter. Next time out, the fight will most likely be fought again in the United States, though Hatton has mentioned wanting to make the fight happen in Manchester. That’s more of a pipe dream for Hatton, however, because the bigger money will be in Las Vegas in comparison to England, which means that this will likely be another fight in which Hatton is unable to fight in his brawling, and sometimes fouling style of fighting.
But, the most important question is: how many fans would be interested in paying their hard-earned money for another expensive PPV bout between Hatton and Mayweather? Indeed, if most people see this as another mismatch like last time, why on earth would they want to see them fight again? To me, at least, the fight seems like another horrible mismatch, the type that I often see when watching ESPN. No doubt, I’m not the only one that sees the fight like this, judging from many of the threads in boxing forums on the internet.
I suppose I wouldn’t mind seeing the fight if it were for free, but even then I would only be interested in watching it as a spectacle, kind of like watching a car wreck on the side of the highway. There’s little that Hatton can do to fix the flaws in his boxing game, for he is what he is, namely a brawler. Against a skilled fighter like Mayweather, Hatton will be picked apart every time with ease, like a boy peeling off the wings from a butterfly. In Hatton’s case, he would only risk suffering another embarrassing defeat at the hands of Mayweather, which would probably be much worse than last time out because Mayweather has his style figured out.
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