By Jim Dower: In winning his fight on May 24th against the tough Mexican Juan Lazcano, former light welterweight champion Ricky Hatton (44-1, 31 KOs) may have destroyed his shot at landing what would likely be a huge mega bout against Oscar De La Hoya in the future. Though Hatton, 29, did end up getting the win over Lazcano, it was a difficult bout for Ricky and one where he appeared to get help from the referee in the 10th round to avoid being knocked out by the Mexican fighter.
This obviously wasn’t missed by De La Hoya, who came out recently and said that he’s not interested in fighting Hatton, that their weight differences between them would be too much for the fight to be able to come off. De La Hoya said that he could probably make the 140 lb weight limit if he had to, but that he would prefer not to have do that. At the same time, De La Hoya had some advice for Hatton, telling him to not to move up to 147 – the welterweight division again – because the extra weight would make a big difference in his performance. Though De La Hoya was trying his hardest to be kind to Hatton, not to ruffle his feathers any, it still came across that Hatton was being rejected as an unsuitable opponent. De La Hoya was previously very interested in fighting Hatton before his recent fight with Lazcano. So what’s changed? Well, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that De La Hoya was probably put off at the sight of seeing Hatton battered around the ring by the weak-punching Lazcano, and on the verge of yet another knockout loss.
The fact that the referee stepped in and seemingly saved the day for Hatton in the 10th when he stopped the fight on two occasions while Hatton was badly hurt and taking punishment – the first being when he warned Lazcano for pushing Hatton’s head down, even though Lazcano was doing nothing of the sort; The second stop in the action occurred immediately after that, as Hatton signaled to the referee, telling him that he needed to have his shoelaces retied. The referee, instead of telling him to wait until the end of the round, which was the logical thing to do given the fact that Hatton was on the verge of being knocked out, instead promptly obliged his request and gave Hatton his time out to have the laces tied on his shoe.
This essentially gave Hatton all the time that he needed to recover and last out the round. Hatton didn’t take too much flake from this in his native England, but in the rest of the world, particularly the United States, they saw it in a different light. Most fans and many other sportswriters as well, saw it as Hatton being saved from being knocked out. Now, it’s one thing to be knocked out by the likes of Floyd Mayweather, who stopped Hatton in the 10th round in December 2007, but quite another thing altogether to be almost knocked out (and needing to be saved by the referee) by a fighter in the class of Lazcano.
This is, perhaps, why De La Hoya has suddenly lost interest in a fight with Hatton. I can’t says I blame De La Hoya, because even though he’d get a huge payday for fighting Hatton, it wouldn’t be something the fans would be interested in seeing because of Hatton’s poor performances in his past two fights. Even more important, because of the size differences, Hatton would look almost like a dwarf next to De La Hoya, and of course, he’d probably get knocked out again if De La Hoya chooses to throw any kind of hard leather.
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