BOXING:When the best pound-for- pound fighter in the world is not battering opponents with his tattoo-gun hand speed, he is grossing out on the America dream, selling his exaggerated lifestyle to the wannabes of Las Vegas and LA.
They love Floyd "Making Millions" Mayweather.
When Ricky Hatton arrived back after a recent promotional carnival in the US to his beloved Manchester, a Sky News presenter stepped onto the elevated platform, microphone in hand, seeking a few live sound-bites from "The Hitman".
What he sought was something homespun and blandly working-class, maybe something about his great nation and how he would wrap the flag around him in Vegas, for the fans.
"I missed my six-year-old for a week," said Hatton, catching a sweet note. "But not as much as you'd think because I've had the fortune to spend the week with another f***ing six-year-old."
As the television presenter spluttered embarrassed apologies for the fighter's profane dismissal of his opponent, the champion from the council estate in Hyde grinned and the fans yelped. You take what you get from the former carpet-layer.
Only at home among his own, the 43 and 0 (with 31 knockouts) Hatton can still do the usual bun-fight nonsense, the nose-to-nose grinning, the trash talk, even that studiously bored look when two fighters chew gum at each other. But the Hollywood glitz and the transparent confection of it does not hang well around those alternately rippling and flabby shoulders of "The Hitman" from Hyde.
Built on the cotton plants of the industrial revolution, Hyde is a Manchester sprawl, where the artist LS Lowry painted his matchstick men and women pouring from the factories. Not much chance Mayweather will know anything about it. But if he did he might learn something of a mindset Hatton has successfully brought to the ring.
For a lad growing up - to peak at 5ft 6ins as an adult - in that area, humour was as useful as a paralysing body punch, and Hatton now has a growing following on the after-dinner circuit, doing an hour's non-scripted routine.
His father?
"He's about five feet tall. Honest, he could hang-glide off a Dorito. He looks like he just fell off a key ring."
His mother?
"She's frightening my mum. Scary. Her Rice Krispies in the morning don't go "snap, crackle, pop," they go "Ssshhh she's f***ing coming."
The nice thing about that one is that his mother gave it to him.
He is the die-hard Manchester City fan, whose best friend is Wayne Rooney. He's the unaffected lad, often seen queuing up after closing time at the local chipper, Guinness-eyed and affably drunk as he hangs with his friends, the Manchester United striker or England cricket's bad boy Freddie Flintoff.
The only obvious signs of his world-champion status are the trace lines on too-soft skin around the eyes and cheeks. They say Mayweather will try to cut him up.
People have coalesced around Hatton, who tonight fights for the WBC welterweight title, because he speaks their language, lives with them and sends his six-year-old son, Campbell, to the same primary school he went to.
He drinks unfeasibly large amounts between fights and has been known to inflate to more than three stones over his normal 10st limit (10st 7lb tonight).
Friends and fans glory in the fact that their unbeaten professional boxer not only walks like them, talks like them, and behaves like them, but also sometimes looks like them.
Until recently his traditional fight-day breakfast at The Butty Box, a local café that was never accused of skimping on the lard, was the "Mega": four sausages, three rashers, two pieces of spam, two slices of black pudding, three fried eggs, two hash browns, baked beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, toast and coffee.
He'd sit there with his younger brother, Matthew, as they challenged each other to see who could eat most of the 3,000-calorie bomb.
While that has changed, culturally, behaviourally and nutritionally, Hatton is at the other end of the spectrum from Mayweather and that is one reason for the respect and affection he enjoys along the terraced streets of Manchester.
They have even forgiven the fan of City, where his father, Ray, was once on the books, for holding his farewell dinner at Old Trafford, before travelling to Las Vegas.
"If there's one thing I can't stand more than Manchester United, it's Cristiano Ronaldo," goes one of Hatton's anecdotes. "I was flicking through the channels the other day and United were playing, so I thought I'm not watching this, I'll hoover up.
"Went round the settee, round the coffee table, round the fireplace and going round the telly accidentally caught it with the hoover - and Ronaldo fell over on the box. He'll be fighting Audley Harrison next."
Billy "The Preacher" Graham has been Hatton's trainer for 11 years. He is philosophical about his fighter's ballooning in weight between fights.
"Ricky is an absolute workhorse in the gym and a hard-living kid on the outside," said Graham. "It's not doing him any good, but I laugh when sportswriters warn he won't have any longevity in the ring. You don't want longevity as a boxer.
"The perfect scenario would be if he beats Mayweather and then walks away from the ring. Ricky knows that's what I want. He's got enough money - if there can be such a thing. And he's got another great career ahead of him as a stand-up and in TV. He's not just a boxer."
He may not be just a boxer, but his fists are what define him. Tonight's (or tomorrow morning's) fight in the MGM is, in terms of prestige and cash, Hatton's potential crock of gold. If he wins there is talk of a fight with the "Golden Boy" himself, Oscar de La Hoya, next summer. A cash tsunami.
This meeting between 29-year-old Hatton and the 30-year-old American former junior lightweight world champion, former lightweight world champion, former junior welterweight world champion, former junior middleweight world champion and current welterweight world champion is likely to net the cheeky Mancunian up to $15 million (€10 million) and Mayweather $20 million (€13.6 million).
But the 24 carat, diamond-encrusted Mayweather has become used to such pay-days. His fight last May against De La Hoya, which he won on a split points decision before promptly retiring, eclipsed all pay-for-view numbers for boxing, even heavyweight bouts, with over 2.5 million subscribing.
Floyd "Pretty Boy" is box office.
"He (Hatton) ain't fighting no Jose Luis Castillo or all those other dudes nobody here has ever heard about," said Mayweather's trainer, Uncle Roger. "Now I know he's earned the right because he's a tough kid, but he's got no skills. He hasn't even got a f***ing jab so what the f*** is he going to do? He's going to get exactly what's coming to him, a good ass-whuppin."
Hatton is seen as too parochial, too much the come-forward, body-punching, brawler to worry the almost supernaturally fast and balanced Mayweather.
Prior to this meeting, he was known for dispossessing the Australian Kostya Tszyu of the undisputed title at the MEN Arena in Manchester in front of 22,000 people.
As Hatton puts it, all of the American press were coming up to him and asking him what it was going to be like fighting at two in the morning, when the fight was timed to go out for TV viewing. "Every f***er fights at two in the morning in Manchester," snapped Hatton.
As much as their styles - Mayweather's flashy and occasionally balletic brilliance and Hatton's blue-collar, unyielding attrition - it's what they represent that puts hands in pockets."We don't mean to make it look like we're better than anybody else," says Mayweather of his money obsessions. "We feel we're even."
Two months ago Hatton was in Dublin. He walked out from the locker-rooms to the ring in Dublin's Point to work the corner of his stablemate Matthew Macklin, a Manchester-based Irish middleweight on the undercard to the Bernard Dunne headline act.
A plain dark T-shirt covered his overweight body as he remained largely in the shadows tending the spit-bucket, content that his role should be peripheral and unheralded. But the whispers from a hard-core boxing crowd were almost reverential: "It's Ricky Hatton . . . It's Ricky Hatton."
But is heart and humility enough?
"He's been down, he cuts easily, he swells and he's fighting the best in the sport," observes Mayweather. "Everyone talks about Hatton's pressure - pressure, pressure, pressure, it's been the same game-plan against me since 1987."
In the city of fortune and chance, this is an opportunity. Eleven years on Hatton has arrived where he always believed he would. This week the humour was less in evidence. The skin had stretched across the high cheekbones and jaw line. The eyes had narrowed. The game face was on.
"I don't lie about a single thing," he said. "People say do you like to have a drink of alcohol, and I say, yes, yes, of course, I love to. And do you like fat foods, yes. And do you put weight on, yes. And, these people are maybe a little bit more vain, would not admit to that, and I do. I think what you see with me is an honesty in my life.
"There's honesty in the way I train and prepare for my fights. My fan base isn't just because of the way I fight. It's the way I am - the way I act."
