A Fantastic Ricky Hatton Tribute by Gorilla Productions

I love this Gorlla Productions' highlights and I think my readers probably will too. Although about half of the video is focused on Ricky Hatton's losses to Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, the first three minutes capture perfectly what The Hitman was about. Hatton wasn't just a whirling dervish, he was a scientific rough houser at close range.

The inside game is a hugely important and overlooked part of boxing and many weight classes are now almost devoid of inside power punchers at the highest levels of the game. For many years the infighter was an almost exclusively North American export, while the traditional upright out fighter was a European commodity mainly championed by the British. It is interesting that despite fighters from the UK who make it to the world stage being more adept as outfighters overall, one of the most powerful infighters at the lower weights in recent years was an Englishman.


Hatton will be remembered by many fans as being a blood and guts fighter who fought some fairly weak competition en route to his world title and as a fighter who never learned the rudiments of defense. All of that is true, but it shouldn't blind us to his genius in his field of boxing and the several times he rose to the occasion against truly elite fighters. Just watch Hatton's work at close range and notice how much is going on.

Frank Klaus,one of the first great infighters, stressed that the normal rules of boxing don't apply in infighting as the range means that it is more about checking the opponent's hands and feeling what is happening than it is about guarding and watching the opponent's movements. Hatton's intuition on the inside was fantastic as he threw double and triple hooks to the body and head off of the same hand. Hatton would also force his opponents to cover with a hook to the head and then uppercut off of the same hand straight up the middle of their guard, or place a glove on their elbow as they kept it tight to their body and use it to steer himself around them to an angle. There is a great deal to be said for Hatton's scientific offense on the inside and it would be delusional to pretend that he got by on power alone.