I loved being with Ricky Hatton. It was an honour... fame didn't change the way he treated people, writes OLIVER HOLT

That night in Manchester, that night in early June 2005, it felt as if Ricky Hatton were immortal. That night he fought the great Kostya Tszyu for IBF light-welterweight world title, it felt as if he could survive anything. It felt as if he could walk through anything. It felt as if he could defeat anything.

It was the kind of night when sport grabs you and holds you spellbound in your seat for more than an hour. Sometimes, the ferocity of that fight was such that even amid the pandemonium and the visceral roars of encouragement, you could hear the thud of Tszyu's punches landing on Hatton and the breath being knocked out of Manchester's finest.

That night was the best fight I've ever seen. One of the best sporting events I've ever been to. Maybe it was also partly because I was invested. Maybe it was partly because I loved Hatton, as everybody who knew him, loved him. Maybe it was because I saw him as an old-fashioned sporting hero.

He was astonishing that night. Time and again, I stared up from my ringside seat at the MEN Arena and watched Hatton march out at the start a round and walk straight into a huge punch from Tszyu. They were the kind of punches that would finish most other men. Hatton shook them off and marched forward again.

He was awe-inspiring. He took punishment over and over again but his spirit would simply not be quelled. There was not an ounce of quit in Hatton. He was relentless. That night was the night he was to fulfil his destiny and he knew it. In the end, he was so indefatigable, so determined that Tszyu could take no more and quit on his stool.

What a night that was. What a privilege to be there. I loved watching Hatton and being around Hatton as much as any sports star I've ever known. He had the courage of a pride of lions and a streak of tigers, he had the humility of an average Joe and the draw of the Pied Piper.

It was one of the great honours of a life spent in sport to spend some time with him away from the ring because he had less artifice than almost any person I have ever met. Fame may have scarred him in some ways but it never changed the way he treated people. He was everyman and if this is a cliché, then it's a cliché, but he was also The People's Champion.

He may not have had the natural talent of Muhammad Ali or Sugar Ray Leonard but he was still one of the fight game's greatest champions. He was part of a golden age of British boxing that included Lennox Lewis and Amir Khan and Hatton was more popular even than either of them.

When he fought in Las Vegas, a large press corps followed in his wake and went on the adventure with him. So did more than 30,000 of his fans. There has never been a British fighter as popular as him, before or since. He turned weigh-ins into spectator events. Yes, he was that charismatic.

A lot of those fans were Manchester City supporters. Hatton loved City and had been through the bad times with them, too. The music that played when he walked to the ring was Blue Moon. City's fans identified with him and he identified with them. It was fitting and right and wonderful of City to organise a tribute to him before the Manchester derby on Sunday.

I saw him fight Juan Urango, Jose Luis Castillo and Floyd Mayweather in Vegas, and after the Castillo fight, he wandered swollen-eyed and a little dishevelled out of the bedroom of his suite to talk to members of the press who had turned up to see him.

'I apologise for my appearance,' he'd say, grinning. 'I had a night out with my friends Mr Guinness and Mr Black.' Hatton loved to drink. He loved the 'shit shirt contests' at his local pub in Hattersley, on the outskirts of Manchester, contests that he would participate in enthusiastically, usually in a garish Hawaiian number.

Sometimes, people talk about sports stars not forgetting their roots even when they have moved away. That kind of observation would be irrelevant for Hatton. Hatton was his roots. He never moved away. He never wanted to. In some ways, I never met anyone as comfortable in their own skin. In other ways, he struggled with what life threw at him.

Some of those struggles became clearer after he retired and the spotlight moved away. More than the spotlight, he missed the discipline of fighting and the buzz of fighting and the fear of the contest and the euphoria of it and the roar of the crowd and, yes, the adulation.

His personal life was not uncomplicated and there were issues in his relationship with his father, Ray. That was the thing that he found it hardest to talk about. He carried the feeling of a man who mourned for something that had been lost.

He spoke courageously and inspiringly about his struggles with mental health and when news of his death broke on Sunday morning, his friend Steve Bunce, the BBC's boxing expert, suggested in a beautiful radio tribute that his openness in talking about his demons would last as a legacy as much as everything he achieved in the ring.

Hatton fought them hard, too. He made fun of himself about his weight. Sometimes he dressed in a fat suit. He made fun of his drinking habits and his addictions. He took everything on.

Eight years ago, I spent an evening with him at one of the Audience with Ricky Hatton stand-up nights at which he excelled as a performer. It was at the Royal British Legion in Runcorn in front of around 300 people. He introduced himself as 'Ricky Hatton, fresh out of rehab'.

One of his opening lines was his explanation for why he had never appeared on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. 'I thought I better not go into the jungle,' he says. 'It was a little bit of bush that got me into trouble in the first place.'

Hatton was spellbinding that night, too. Now and again, he danced across the stage in that working men's club, shadow-boxing and throwing punches and re-imagining one of his earlier fights against a granite-jawed opponent called Ben Tackie.

There was something poignant about the night, too. Hatton was adored but old fighters feel the passage of time more keenly than most sportsmen, perhaps because there is nothing that can replicate the visceral adrenaline rush, the mortal fear, of what they once did.

It carried faint echoes of the scene from Raging Bull where Robert de Niro's Jake LaMotta is entertaining a small crowd in a lounge bar with verses of doggerel. Hatton was better at it than LaMotta was and the night in Runcorn didn't have the air of seedy sadness that the scene in Raging Bull had, but there was still a certain sadness about it.

Hatton didn't hide from that, either. Hatton never hid. He never hid about how much his defeat to Mayweather had hurt him or the shame he felt at his second round knockout defeat to Manny Pacquiao.

I sat backstage with him for a while that night at the Legion. Hatton gazed around what passed for a green room. There were some marks on the wall where it looked as if a small cabinet has fallen from its fastenings.

A sink skulked in the far corner, next to a worn brown leather sofa and a formica-topped table. It was a far cry from the bright lights of Las Vegas. Hatton looked over at his friend and long-time manager, Paul Speak. 'F*** the MGM Grand,' he said, smiling.

He talked, too, about what happens when the zeitgeist moves on and the old fighter remembers how things used to be.

'I miss the roar of the crowd,' he said, that night in Runcorn. 'I can't go to big fights, it upsets me. You want those days when it's you in the ring to last for ever.

'I miss it every day but I find it hard going to the big fights. The crowd roars. I don't like it. It upsets me. It depresses me. I don't want to sound like a broken record, but you want those days when it's you in the ring to last for ever. Sometimes it's really hard for me to keep things steady.

'When a big fight comes along, that is when it is hard for me. That's why you won't see me at many big fights. At the Manchester Arena, when the crowd roars, it cripples me. In some ways, it is the worst feeling in the world when you are in that tunnel before the fight and the crowd is waiting for you to come out into the arena. But when it's gone, you look back and think it was the best feeling.

'It's like you're stood on the edge of the world and you're looking over the edge. When I was top of the bill, you used to have a ring entrance where you'd be in the tunnel and Blue Moon would start up and you would walk out.

'You would be in there on your own in the dark in this little tunnel watching your opponent walk to the ring. I would be in there and I used to think every time, "What the f*** am I doing this for?" It's that bit of fear I miss now.'

Hatton was supposed to attend a fight on Saturday evening but he did not make it. That was what raised the alarm. Hatton spoke that night in Runcorn about attempting suicide. He did not pull his punches. 'I felt like a fraud,' he said. 'I felt I had let everyone down. I was very poorly. I couldn't kill myself, so I thought I would drink myself to death.'

But through it all, he wanted to make people laugh. He wanted to be honest but he did not want anyone to feel sorry for him. He tried to use laughter as a cure. 'I cannot guarantee you are going to laugh tonight,' he told that audience in Runcorn, 'but I can guarantee it will last longer than the Pacquiao fight.'

So perhaps it is best to remember a joke he told that night about an early moment in his career. 'One of my first fights was against this guy,' he said, 'and when we were at the weigh-in, he was covered in tattoos from head to toe. I didn't know whether to fight him or read him.'

That was Ricky Hatton. Always coming forward, always swinging, never taking a step back, never artificial, never for a moment, always a hero to me and to millions more for the fighter he was and for the man that he was.