When we talk about Ricky Hatton, we talk too about the superstars he fought. When we talk about Junior Witter, we talk about the superstar he didn’t fight.
It was perhaps the greatest “one that got away” in British boxing history, and one that left the avoided fighter with an obvious void on his record.
It seems unfair Witter is remembered more for the one thing he didn’t do than the considerable amount of things he did.
Witter won and defended a WBC title. He took ownership of a Lonsdale Belt and also won European and Commonwealth honours. He fought a pound-for-pounder on nine days’ notice and then went on a 21-fight winning streak that had all but Hatton and his team clamouring for a showdown with Manchester’s ‘Hitman’.
The irony is that Witter would probably more appreciated for his own merits had his name not been tied on to Hatton’s for the majority of his career. We’d be leading instead with the night Witter outfoxed DeMarcus Corley for the WBC super-lightweight title, beating him more comfortably than had Floyd Mayweather; or his punch-perfect demolition of Vivian Harris in defence of that belt; or when he boxed Zab Judah in a football stadium; or any of a number of world-class wins over the likes of Jan Bergman, Giuseppe Lauri, Lovemore Ndou, Andriy Kotelnik or Colin Lynes (twice).
Witter would probably prefer he was remembered for those things, but he understands his legacy is as much about what-if than what happened. That much is clear from the title of his recently released autobiography, The Avoided.
Though defined by the void that should have been filled by a Hatton fight, Witter also claims he was avoided by a number of other marquee names.
He makes the point that his crowning night came in a vacant title fight with Corley only because Mayweather had relinquished that WBC belt. He says fights with Amir Khan and Paulie Malignaggi were agreed but later fell through, and his calls for a match with Shane Mosley came to nothing.
And he says that while most obviously Hatton’s team felt Witter was too high-risk, he reckons not even Ricky relished the prospect of meeting ‘The Hitter’ from Bradford.
“Realistically, if he wanted it, he was in charge of his own career, so it would have happened,” says Witter, now 52.
“Especially once he left Frank [Warren], he had the choice of then fighting anybody in the world, so if he wanted to box me, he would have.”
Sadly, of course, Hatton can no longer speak for himself, following his untimely death last year.
Witter to an extent retains a degree of regret that the fight never happened, but he is more pragmatic now, and says the would-be rivals did become friends once they were no longer on one another’s fistic radars.
“There was maybe a bit of pride, a bit of needle, but it wasn’t a grudge,” he says. “The fight should have happened, but I didn’t hate him. It was more a case of trying to get that extra publicity.
“The funny thing is, he had no banter with me. Every time, he won slagging matches [with opponents], but every time he interacted with me, he seemed stiff, he didn’t flow, his words seemed premeditated, whereas I jumped around [verbally] and he couldn’t keep up.
“I thought, ‘you’ve got no banter; how can we sell anything?’ I have friends who knew him and they all said Ricky’s got banter, but I just didn’t see it.
“It’s interesting, because he got the better of Mayweather with the verbals, but with me he never.
“But then later, like 2010-2011, I started going over to spar at his gym. We met up again and he was cool. He just relaxed. There was no longer that tension of ‘this fight could happen’. It simmered down and he got back into his normal form.
“And then his banter came out and he kept crushing me, and I’m thinking, ‘oh, you f***ing twat!’ I’m glad it wasn’t on camera. I said, ‘OK, I’ve got to give it to you.”
A cautious friendship developed.
“We’d see each other at shows and we’d have a chat, or I’d go over [to his gym], and it got to the point where, in 2013, we were talking about going on holiday together. He asked me, but I had a fight coming up. If I didn’t have that fight coming up at that point, we’d have gone to Tenerife together.”
That shows how far the former rivals had come. In different circumstances, they may indeed have fought, or they may have become friends earlier.
Witter was as saddened as anybody by his death.
“I was so shocked,” he says. “It didn’t feel real. It took a long while to sink in. If I was going to a show, I’d think ‘oh, Ricky might be there,’ and then I’d remember, ‘no, he’s gone’. Still, every now and then I expect to see him somewhere.”
By the time that 2013 holiday idea was being floated, Hatton had concluded his competitive boxing career, and Witter was nearing the end of his. He’d wrap things up a year and a half later with a record of 43-8-2 (23).
If Witter had found it difficult to get the fights he wanted even in his prime, he realised the breaks were even less likely to be forthcoming at 41.
“I still had some good upside at that stage, definitely,” he says. “I’d won a second British title [in 2012], against Colin Lynes; a great fighter, very good technical boxer. I won it comfortably, so I knew I still had plenty of ability.
“I won that, but the Frankie Gavin fight [l ud 12, November 2012] was the worst camp I’d ever had. Nothing went right, nothing worked, and the desire wasn’t there, the fear wasn’t there. I wasn’t scared of Frankie Gavin, and that’s a terrible thing to happen, because you need some fear of your opponent. I just didn’t perform.
“After Frankie Gavin, I went to box for an EU title, definitely got robbed in that. I just thought, I’m in my 40s; no one’s giving me a chance. No one’s given me a chance for 10 years.
“Dom [Ingle] was saying, ‘keep at the weight and we’ll get you a last-minute fight,’ and I’m just like, I did that 20 years ago, and there’s no way I’m going to walk around 3lb above my fighting weight all the time when I haven’t got a fight.
“So, I just went, if something isn’t pencilled in by my birthday, I’ll hang them up, move on to coaching. I’d been doing it for the last few years anyway.”
Witter had been helping out at the same Wincobank gym in Sheffield in which he spent his whole professional career, so it was an obvious transition once his own fighting days were over, and then led on to him setting up his own facility, Witters Boxing Club in Rotherham.
“I started [coaching at Wincobank] in 2014, 2015. Because by that point Brendan [Ingle] was bad; he had Alzheimer’s. He went from athletic and fit to his memory started going. So, there was this guy, Andy Nice, who used to be in charge of the amateurs; he went, ‘we need you to be a coach,’ and I went, ‘I ain’t got time for that’.
“He badgered me for a while. He said, ‘all the kids love you, they respect you and they all listen to you way more than they do any of us’, so I went, ‘OK, we’ll figure out a way’. I took it on and I became the head coach.
“I spent half my time training kids and half my time training myself. When I decided I was packing up, I thought, right, I’m going to do this full-time. Then in 2018, after Brendan passed, there was a gym in Rotherham that I knew the guy who ran it. He wanted someone to take over the gym. So, I took over, repackaged it, renamed it, and it’s been going ever since.
“I got his gym when he had five kids in there, that were it. And then within that first year, I turned it around, got more kids coming in, had a national champion, had a kid in national finals.
“We started running a mental health class down there, some community work, grassroots stuff. It’s not all about the fame, it’s the grassroots stuff you get your most pleasure from – seeing people grow and improve.”
Arguably, few boxers have grown and improved quite as much as did Junior Witter. His own career arc was that of a man with no major backing, who began boxing in the away corner and went all the way to a world championship through a combination of persistence, a few upsets and a fight-anyone mentality.
That latter attribute was never more evident than when Witter boxed Zab Judah in 2000.
Judah was the new IBF 140lb champion being talked about in pound-for-pound terms and had been given the chief support slot on a Mike Tyson undercard in Glasgow, when his original opponent, Jason Rowland, had to cancel after his pet dog bit off part of his finger. Witter stepped in at nine days’ notice with a 15-0-2 record compiled almost entirely at six-round level to face one of the brightest stars of American boxing.
Witter lost a unanimous decision but won a few rounds in a performance that was more than credible, given the circumstances. And it proved an invaluable experience, as it led him to rethink his approach and reinvent himself as ‘The Hitter’.
“I didn’t have enough belief in my punch power,” he says.
“I did think I had every chance to win if I boxed; if I hit and run, I could nick it. I thought if I stand and have a war with him, it’s not looking good for me. It’s not who I was at that time.”
But it was who Witter would become. A run of 15 consecutive knockouts ensued, garnering British, Commonwealth and European titles, all while continually building the case for a Hatton fight.
That never happened, but three further wins – all unanimous decisions – secured Witter his world title shot, which he seized with an impressive dissection of ‘Chop Chop’ Corley in London in September 2006.
“I boxed, controlled, even though I had so much more to give,” he says. “I clipped him with a shot early on and after that he never came out of his shell.
“He wouldn’t stand and fight, which is not like him, is it?”
It isn’t. Even Mayweather would tell you that, after an aggressive Corley gave him a scare in 2004. It was perhaps Corley’s performance against Witter that proved more than the result itself of how good the prime Witter was, and why he was avoided by some – including, Witter says, by Mayweather, who he fancied he had the beating of: “I watched him box Emmanel Augustus [a highly unorthodox contender who gave Mayweather fits in October 2000 before losing on a ninth-round stoppage] and I thought Augustus was absolutely unreal.
“As I see it, he does a lot of the stuff I do, just I’m better at it. I hit that bit harder, I’m that bit sharper. I was confident I’d beat him.”
We’d never find out, but Witter did score two more world title wins, including a resounding knockout of Vivian Harris, which he ranks as the best result on his record.
“I knew he was good, I knew he was strong and he could punch. And I just thought, yes, I need that challenge. And I went out and I did it [w ko 7]. It was the performance I wanted against someone that everybody knew was dangerous.”
That, in September 2007, might have been the ideal moment to make Witter vs Hatton, with both holding world titles and both coming off brilliant performances (Hatton had just knocked out Jose Luis Castillo). But Hatton then signed to meet Mayweather for megabucks in Las Vegas.
Witter would lose his title in his next fight, against Timothy Bradley, and fail in a bid to regain it from Devon Alexander 15 months later. Like most fighters, he has his ways to rationalise these defeats, and the back-and-forth form that followed them.
But at his peak, Witter’s form spoke for itself. It’s just a shame it didn’t speak convincingly enough to fill the void left by the fight that never was.
