Britain’s Ricky “The Hitman” Hatton is “very pleased” the fight against Filipino boxing icon Manny Pacquiao is on and will sign the contract on Tuesday or Wednesday.
That’s the word from Hatton’s father Ray Hatton in a telephone conversation with insidesports.ph, Standard Today and Viva Sports early Tuesday morning.
Hatton said “Ricky wants to fight Manny and Manny wants to fight Ricky” but when the two sides kept going back and forth over the issue of a guaranteed purse and a revenue sharing deal which Pacquiao wanted, the IBO junior welterweight champion took his mind off the fight during his entertainment tour.
Ray Hatton said the contract arrived on Monday but that lawyer Gareth Williams was on his way back to Manchester from London and “will look at it (the contract) and then Ricky will sign it probably on Tuesday or Wednesday when he’s back in town.” Hatton is currently in Plymouth.
He said a formal announcement that the fight is on will probably be made on Thursday or Friday this week.
Top Rank promoter Bob Arum told us that “everything is in place now” even as he disclosed that the planned promotional tour in London and Manchester, the hometown of Hatton will take place “at the end of February before he (Pacquiao” goes into training camp” set for March 1 at Freddie Roach’s Wild Card gym in Los Angeles.
Arum said he was coming to Manila for a press conference regarding the blockbuster championship double-header he is staging at the Araneta Coliseum on March 15 in cooperation with Solar Sports but wasn’t sure of the exact date.
Hatton earlier said there’s hardly any time to fit the planned promotional tour kickoff as originally planned for January 27th in London and the 28th because of the delay in having the contract finalized.
Ray Hatton said they “go on holiday on January 30 and return in the middle of February.” We learned that there was a possibility that Pacquiao may travel to England once Hatton returns from his holiday in the middle of February which was confirmed by Arum who also told us that they planned to squeeze in US tour stops in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles before the hard training grind gets underway.
Ray Hatton recalled that Pacquiao and his family had wanted to look around London and the promotional stop would have given them a chance to do that.
Hatton himself disclosed that Ricky will “go into the gym on February 16 or 17 and will fly to Las Vegas after two weeks of training in Britain. He said Hatton would train under Floyd Mayweather Sr in Las Vegas and would surely benefit from it.
Source: boxingscene.com
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