“Why could nothing be done for him?” asks Barry McGuigan. “Why didn’t he go straight into the hospital and go, ‘Look, I need serious help here?’”
There’s despair in McGuigan’s voice as we talk about Ricky Hatton, whose body was found in his home near Manchester on the morning of Sunday, September 14th. He was 46. The local police said they were not treating the death as suspicious.
“Boxers have a real vulnerability,” McGuigan says. “They all do. The machismo is what you see and what all your fans want to see. But the reality is that you’re just a normal human being. Many of them are flawed and weak like everybody else.
“They take up boxing to become tough, a lot of them. Or at least outwardly tough. They do it to have that armour around you that makes other people think, ‘Oh, this guy’s a machine’. But that’s all bol***ks.
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“Because at the end of it all, it’s a sport. It’s a very tough sport. You have to appear to be self-confident and macho and all of that. We all understand that. But you peel it all back and a lot of guys who are great fighters are actually, in real time, worriers. They’re concerned about things and just normal human beings.
“A lot of fighters have self-worth issues. Many of them take up boxing for that very reason. You can hide it outwardly but when you’re in your own space, it reappears and it doesn’t go away. There are many great fighters who were very sad guys. Very sad and very lonely.”
This is all still very raw. And of all people, Barry McGuigan feels that rawness to the bone. First and foremost, he knew Hatton well, having covered so many of his fights while working for Sky Sports. From the early days, when Hatton fought Ballymena’s Mark Winters in December, 1999, to the mad nights in Vegas and beyond, McGuigan was about as up close and personal as you could get.
“A cheeky, funny chap,” he says of the Ricky Hatton he knew. ”Always self-deprecating, taking the piss out of himself and out of you as well. Good fun. He fought in such an attractive way that everybody wanted to see him. He couldn’t get up on his toes and dance around the ring. That was not him.
“He just walked you down and had a fight with you. He was a great personality, very likable guy. No nonsense sort of a guy. Very funny. But hard on himself. Very hard on himself.
“I really liked him. He was such a great fella, so kind and generous and good to others. And yet he couldn’t appeal for help when he was at such a low stage.”
On the mental health front, McGuigan has visceral personal experience too. His brother Dermot died by suicide in October, 1994. Even as three decades have passed, he still finds it extremely difficult to talk about. A couple of times during our conversation, his voice catches and he has to take a moment.
“My brother Dermot, when I think about it . . . I was living in England when he did it. I think he was embarrassed to talk about it. He said, ‘I feel like killing myself. I feel shit’. And my family said, ‘Please don’t do that. Please don’t talk about that’.
“But he did it. It’s that split-second thing. And when you have your mind made up, that’s it. All it takes is a couple of seconds. It never gets any easier. I wish I’d been in the room. I think I could have talked him out of it. He meant so much to me.”
This stuff still cuts deep with McGuigan. He tried to set up a boxer’s union back in the day, so that there would be somewhere to go and some help available to boxers who struggle with their mental health. He was a driving force behind the Professional Boxers’ Association, which became the British Boxers’ Association, which eventually fizzled out.
“I tried my level best,” he says. “I busted my arse trying to get it off the ground. But it was back to the same old story. It just wouldn’t work because the fighters didn’t want to admit weakness.
“It keeps coming back to the same old thing – ‘I don’t want to give away the fact that I’m weak’. But it’s not being weak. That’s a stupid load of bol***ks. It’s not being weak. But they think of it as a form of weakness to say, ‘Look, I can’t handle my mental health’.
“Boxing is not conducive to unity because it’s all about individualism and it’s all about the fact that you’re going through hell and nobody else is. A member of your family might understand it but you push them away and you focus on yourself and you hurt yourself.
“And the irony is, the more you hurt yourself, the better you become as a fighter. The more you punish yourself, the better conditioned you are, the harder you are. Therein lies the horror of it all.”
Hatton talked at length about his mental health struggles. McGuigan’s wish is that people keep talking. He wants them to talk so loud that sporting bodies around the world – not just in boxing – take the time to listen.
“It’s so sad. If they had help, they could turn their whole life around. I hope all of the sports take notice. Mental health is such a problem in sport. Such a major problem. There is so much money in sport that surely to god we can put together some sort of structure for sportspeople who are going through it.
“Something that they don’t have to pay for, something that’s there for them, free of charge, that they would have counselling if and when they are going through a difficult time. They of course would have to say it. And that’s part of the problem.
“They have got to say, ‘Look, I’m not feeling well’. That is a profound problem. Because that is unmanly to say. ‘I am going through a difficult time.’ That is almost surrender for guys who are macho. We have to get past that.”
You can access Let’s Talk About Suicide at https://traininghub.nosp.ie
If you are affected by any of the issues in this piece, please contact The Samaritans at 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.ie
