Three months after Hatton’s death, his bereft former trainer Billy Graham, friend Jane Couch and his brother Matthew are all trying to find a hopeful future amid the grief
“Of course I remember,” Billy Graham says quietly as he pushes back his straw trilby to show me his wounded expression. “I can remember everything.”
Graham, who trained Ricky Hatton for all but the last three of his 48 fights, used to sit with his fighter on the grimy steps outside their first boxing gym in Salford in the late 1990s. It was a more innocent time and, rather than being called The Preacher and The Hitman, they were just Billy and Ricky then.
They were still years away from the mass adulation and the desperately lonely end. But, even when reminiscing, The Preacher can’t escape the fact that, this weekend, it will be exactly three months since his lost friend is thought to have taken his own life at the age of 46. On 14 September, Hatton’s body was found at home, in Hyde, six miles from where we sit now in Mossley, on the outskirts of Manchester.
For weeks there was an outpouring of grief and love for Hatton in Manchester and boxing. The pain continues, privately, among the fighter’s family and friends. But a national story brought a sobering acceptance that such glory and fervour will not return soon to boxing in this country. It is hard to imagine a fighter today being able to conjure up the magic which Hatton once created. Tens of thousands of fans, most of whom considered themselves personal friends of The Hitman, followed the wise-cracking, ferocious urchin-faced boxer from Manchester to Las Vegas with roaring joy.
