Big Brown Bag
Really enjoyed Kevin Mitchell’s article on Ricky Hatton in this month’s Sport Monthly. Fantastic sports journalism.
“To watch Hatton hone his skills is to understand not just the unglamorous agony of boxing but the finely tuned mechanics of the art. For minutes on end, he will stay transfixed on the target, lungs sucking at the stale air as he props forward at 80 degrees or so to the horizontal. He is prevented from toppling over not just by his proximity to the bag, which weighs about 100lb, but by an invisible force: his own certainty of where his feet and body should be. His footwork is neat, nimble. His shoulders roll and ripple. He never strays out of position, shifting to the rhythm of the smoothly swaying weight, right to left then back again, over and over, his wicked punches carving craters in the worn leather. Above the revved-up music that bounces off the grimy walls, you can hear the spare air hissing out through gaps in the stitching. You would not want to be a big brown bag in Manchester.”
Kevin Mitchell, Local Hero