Ricky Hatton V. Floyd Mayweather, Or, A Study of The Ying-Yang Nature of Pugilist Horn-Tooting, Part One

by: Brian Deines
Joboja Staff Writer

As the two biggest undefeated names in boxing square-off, the glory of basic pugilistic instinct is on display Saturday Night in Las Vegas.

It is true that there is nothing quite like Fight-Night in Vegas.

The distinct, frenzied and perverse energy that floats across a Las Vegas casino floor one hour before a Championship Fight is as aboriginal to America as a whiff of McDonald's french fries after ten days on The Hollywood Diet.

Based on that notion, we made the call last February to get tickets to a UFC, Mixed Martial Arts Fight. Except that the UFC event was the following weekend.

Instead, we settled on tickets to the boxing event in the Paris Ballroom headlined by someone named Ricky Hatton.

Secretly, my expectations were not high. The bar had been set at my bachelor party and a Caesar's Palace, Sugar Shane Mosley fight that saw him enter the ring like a thrilling, chilling flashback to someone else's Phil Collins' In the Air At Night memories of 1983.

But any notions I had of a quiet evening were dispersed the first time the bleachers began to rumble.

We quickly realized the ticket broker had seated us in the middle of Manchester, England.

Thousands of blokes had followed Ricky Hatton across the pond, wearing new Mullets and Blazers, and brought with them a string of chants, stomps, diddies, pithy remarks, feck-offs, and proper drunken saltiness.

There of course was only one option: fall in line.

The crowd carried Hatton (you realize now if Mayweather had this kind of following, perhaps he wouldn't have to toot his own horn so much) and he carried us, but beneath all the stomping, when Ricky would get hit, I sensed the kind of queasy unease that seeps in when anxiety leaks a wave of gnashed-molar gleak-runoff straight into a gut full of Miller High Life.

Regardless, Ricky won that night handily and again this past Spring. Floyd Mayweather comes into the fight after beating Oscar De La Hoya as the self-proclaimed "greatest fighter of all time".

On Saturday, I think the boastful poor-form finally catches up with Mayweather.

And I predict Hatton shocks the World on the strength of his left hook to the liver and 4,000 drunken, stomping Englanders.