By William Mackay: Undefeated Floyd Mayweather Jr. says he pretty much finished Ricky Hatton as a fight in their December 2007 fight in which Mayweather stopped Hatton in the 10th round in Las Vegas, Nevada. In an article in The Sun, Mayweather says “Ricky fought everyone. Until he came up against me, he’d reached the highest plateau in boxing and then failed. But it’s ok, because at least Ricky tried.” Mayweather not content a little about this particular subjected, added “In life you need to take big risks to know who you are.”
In that respect, Mayweather needs to practice what he preaches a little more often because he has a reputation of being a fighter who selectively chooses his opponents, looking for beatable fighters and avoiding tougher ones like Paul Williams, Antonio Margarito and Miguel Cotto.
Indeed, rather than go after a fighter from his own weight class in his recent comeback, Mayweather has instead opted to go after lightweight Juan Manuel Marquez, who is much smaller than him.
Mayweather, commenting on Matthew Hatton, the brother of Ricky Hatton who will be fighting on the undercard of Mayweather’s bout against Marquez on September 19th, said “I don’t think he [Matthew Hatton] holds a grudge against me for effectively ending his brothers’ career.”
As for whether Mayweather ruined Hatton as a fighter or not, there are different views by boxing experts on this subject. There are some people who feel that Mayweather did hurt Hatton’s ability to take a big shot in his fight with Hatton in 2007. They point out that Hatton was hurt by Juan Lazcano in Ricky’s next fight following the Mayweather bout five months later.
Lazcano, a good fighter but not a real big puncher, hurt Hatton in the 8th round with a big left hand. However, while Lazcano was in the process of pummeling Hatton and trying to finish him off, Hatton motioned to the referee that he needed to have his shoes tied. The referee stopped the action to allow Hatton to have his shoes taken care of, despite the fact the stoppage interrupted what appeared to be a crucial point in the fight and may have saved Hatton from being knocked out.
The timeout allowed Hatton to recover and finish the remainder of the round. The fight was held in England, Hatton’s home country. The shot that Lazcano hit Hatton with wasn’t a big punch by any stretch of the imagination.
Hatton had been in with much bigger punchers in the past like Kostya Tszyu and been hit with tremendous shots during his career, yet he’d never been really hurt before. The timing of Hatton being hurt by an average looking shot from Lazcano, coming off a knockout loss to Mayweather only five months previous to that, leads some people to believe that Hatton’s ability to take punishment was diminished after the Mayweather bout.
However, the other experts feel that Hatton was the same fighter, but feel that his hard life style had finally caught up to him. For a long time, Hatton had a bad habit of drinking and overeating in between fights causing his weight to balloon up dramatically.
For a normal person to do this is obviously not a good thing but for a top world class athlete like Hatton to do it, possibly led to his a decreased ability to absorb heavy shots. Another theory on this matter is that Hatton was essentially same fighter he always was but he finally met his match when he stepped up a little too high class and was smacked back down.
The way that Hatton fought against Pacquiao in their May 2nd fight, showing little defense, there’s a very good chance that the same result (Hatton being knocked out in the 2nd round) would have occurred even if this fight had taken place way back in 2005, the year that many boxing experts feel that Hatton was at the apex of his career.
Comments are closed.