British Honours: A Tale Of Two Boxing Icons, Ricky Hatton And Naseem Hamed

ByJames Oakley

As One Undeserving Briton Loses His Honor, Another Deserving One Steps Up

When it was revealed that former world featherweight champion “Prince” Naseem Hamed was to be stripped of his MBE award, the extremely rare action attracted massive attention in the national press. Hamed has not yet commented on the dishonour, however his former trainer Brendan Ingle predicted that it would be a “terrible blow” to both the Prince and his Sheffield community, who were very proud of his award.

Despite much speculation of a return to the ring, Naseem Hamed has now been retired from the fight game for over four years, seemingly to never quite recover from his loss to ring legend Marco Antonio Barrera.

Hamed was stripped of his MBE after being jailed after seriously injuring motorist Anthony Burgin when driving on the wrong side of the road at 90 mph. Hamed served 16 weeks of his 15 month sentence and caused an outrage when he left prison with an entourage, allegedly muttering “Thank God no one died”.

On the other hand, we have light welterweight Ricky Hatton, who was recently awarded an MBE in recognition of his boxing skills and achievements and also for charity work in his community.

Hatton is currently undefeated and scheduled to face Juan Urango for the IBO and IBF belts on January 20 in Las Vegas. Hatton’s unblemished record was considered unproven until 2005 when he scored a tremendous TKO over one of the top pound for pound fighters in the world at the time, Kostya Tszyu.

He has since followed that up with two more world titles and is a champion in two weight divisions. Hatton is no doubt an example to follow, a nice guy outside the ring who loves nothing more than a pint and McDonald’s after his fights.

In most people’s opinions, “The Hitman” is more than worthy of the MBE award he has been given, while Hamed’s actions, unfortunate as they were, were illegal and certainly worthy of at least the jail sentence he received.

We are all sure that Ricky Hatton will never cause the MBE given to him to be revoked and will represent his country as fantastically as he has been doing, for many years to come.

We all hope the Prince will not give the authorities any further reason to put him behind bars.