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RICKY HATTON ought to have been here.
A man who united the worlds of football and boxing through his love for Manchester City ought to have been at the Etihad Stadium, relishing the prize-fight tension of derby day.
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Hatton, a 5ft 7in Stockport-born boyhood Manchester City fan, would have appreciated the sight of another 5ft 7in Stockport-born boyhood City fan, Phil Foden, heading City towards victory.
And then the sight of Erling Haaland – another man raised on City, when his father played for the club – striking a forceful second-half one-two to leave United on the canvas.
There had been a seat reserved for Hatton in one of the Etihad’s hospitality areas but it remained empty.
Instead a 55,000 packed house applauded him and they sang of ‘Walking In a Hatton Wonderland’ – just as many of them would have done in the casinos and the dive bars of Las Vegas when they followed him across the Atlantic in their droves almost 20 years ago.
READ MORE ON RICKY HATTON
News of the two-weight world champion’s death, at the age of 46, had emerged on a grey and sodden Mancunian morning and it had struck like a sickening body shot to the solar plexus.
Occasionally the premature passing of a sporting legend does this to us – even though we may have feared that those heroes would never make old bones.
Diego Maradona, Shane Warne, Hatton. Men who lived life to the full, to excess.
For what could be more excessive than pummelling one of the greatest fighters of your generation into submission and retirement, as Hatton did to Kostya Tszyu, in front of 22,000 adoring local fans in 2005?
What could be more excessive than pied-pipering tens of thousands of your fellow Mancunians to Sin City to roar you on as you go toe-to-toe with the generational talents of Floyd Mayweather Jr and Manny Pacquiao?
And how then to live anything resembling an ordinary life once you have experienced such extremes?
Hatton was a charismatic scallywag, a titch with dynamite in his fists and a near-constant smile on his rearranged fighter’s features.
He was flawed and fragile and vulnerable yet warm, engaging, funny and hugely loved for his deep authenticity.
Terms such as ‘man of the people’ and ‘working-class hero’ can be over-egged and over-used but never in the case of Hatton.
Hatton was an MBE who held the world-title belts of the IBF and the WBA but he was never interested in being a VIP.
For him, the only roped-off area was the boxing ring itself.
At the height of his career, he was still slinging arrows in a local darts league for the New Inn, a pub in the Greater Manchester council estate of Hattersley which his parents used to own.
In a Sunday Times interview before his first professional defeat, at the hands of Mayweather in 2007, Hatton said: “I’d like to think not a single thing has changed in how I act between when I didn’t have a pot to p*** in and now.
“I think people watch me first because I’m an exciting fighter. But I think they watch me too because they look on me as a mate.
“I love the fact that when I go into a pub or a club, people will say, ‘In’t he a good lad?’ I’d be devastated if people thought I was up my own a**e.”
Hatton was a very good boxer rather than a truly great one but, for a time, his box-office pulling power was virtually unrivalled in all of sport
Hatton never did change, even in a retirement that was often troubled.
He had been due to make a comeback fight against a fellow veteran in Dubai in December.
It smacked of an understandable desperation to recapture long-gone glories.
Yet Hatton was found dead at home in his native Hyde on derby-day morning.
And before kick-off, City’s PA announcer Danny Jackson struggled to hold back tears as he read a brief eulogy to Hatton, drowned out by a minute’s applause from a sell-out crowd.
Hatton grew up supporting a very different Manchester City to this one.
His love of football was honed on The Kippax terrace at the old Maine Road, with its inflatable bananas and its overwhelming stench of weed.
He’d idolised Giorgi Kinkladze and Shaun Goater, men who were never in the running for the Ballon d’Or but who oozed the kind of cult-hero status Hatton would himself enjoy.
He’d enjoyed pre-match nosebags in the Blue Moon chippy and post-match pints in local boozers which are now boarded-up ghost pubs on Moss Side.
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The culture of those streets never left him, nor would ever have wanted to escape it.
Even at his peak, Hatton would readily admit to a between-fights diet of full English fry-ups and pints of Guinness.
After a second-round knock-out from Pacquiao turned out the lights on his career as an elite fighter, Hatton would go into rehab in a bid to fight alcoholism and depression as well as Class A drug use.
When Hatton turned pro in the late 90s, City were spiralling towards the third tier of English football.
When he staged ringwalks for prize fights, with the club crest on his shorts, to the strains of City’s melancholy anthem Blue Moon, the club were yet to be taken over by Abu Dhabi, yet to win Premier League titles and still existed in the foreboding shadows of United’s long dominance.
Hatton was a very good boxer rather than a truly great one but, for a time, his box-office pulling power was virtually unrivalled in all of sport.
His victory over Tszyu – the Russian-born Aussie and pound-for-pound great – was one of the greatest upsets ever pulled off by a British fighter.
In front of a packed Manchester Arena, Hatton forced Tszyu to quit on his stool, his trainer chucking in the towel before the bell tolled for the final round.
Hatton’s most extraordinary achievement, however, was the sheer vastness of his support and his uncommon closeness to them.
Yet a man who adored City, and was adored by this city, died alone on derby-day morning, when he ought to have been here, among his people.
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