Fighting back - there is a sense of the public embracing boxing again

As Hatton was fighting off tears and calling himself 'a mug' for losing to Floyd Mayweather, Joe Calzaghe was taking possession of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award live on camera.

Never mind that the corporation is so loath to bid for big fights that the British Boxing Board of Control is exerting pressure through MPs for it to fulfil its public service broadcasting obligations and support the renaissance in the ring.

Collectively, the people had turned over Lewis Hamilton, a runner-up in the Formula One world championship, in favour of Calzaghe, who conquered the unbeaten Mikkel Kessler in front of 50,000 in Cardiff and has never been vanquished in a professional fight.

The Cardiff attendance and the 15,000 who travelled to Las Vegas to see Mayweather's genius dazzle the people's champion into submission tell a story of Britain's warriorimpulses finding an outlet again through the Marquess of Queensberry rules.

There have been moments in the past 15 years when boxing seemed a dying animal; when the American Gerald McClellan was maimed in a London ring and when the American fight trade appeared to be conning itself into death.

While the inexorable rise of UFC, or cage fighting, has forced boxers and promoters to agree matches that politics might previously have scuppered, in Britain a core of stars have emerged to bring prize-fighting in from the margins.

Even from this distance it was plain England was in tumult over the Mayweather-Hatton fight as the Manchester man's engaging personality drew floating viewers to a contest that was an authentic clash of continents, styles, characters and unbeaten records.

Made melancholic by remorse and ale, but still blaming the referee as well as himself for the ignominious nature of his defeat, Hatton was disconsolate as he took a place alongside Calzaghe for the BBC's transatlantic broadcast.

He is too decent to envy his compatriot, the undisputed master of the world super-middleweight division, but to be awarded third place in the BBC's poll while Calzaghe took the trophy at the scene of Mayweather's overwhelming triumph must have been as painful of any of the Pretty Boy's piercing blows. But outside Hatton's world of pain at the weekend, Amir Khan demolished Graham Earl in 72 seconds in Bolton and was hailed by his promoter Frank Warren as a potential British Sugar Ray Leonard.

Meanwhile here in Las Vegas, Golden Boy Promotions were claiming that Calzaghe and Bernard Hopkins had agreed to a 50-50 split for a fight at lightheavyweight in America in April.

"I'm ready, and since they booed the national anthem (before Mayweather- Hatton), I'm gonna get 'em back," promised Hopkins. "I'm going to make a political thing. Old ladies are going to come on walking sticks to support the American boy. The hillbillies are going to come down to see the fight. I'll just tell them the British are coming and are going home with their ass kicked."

Hucksterism and self-parody aside, Calzaghe and the rest of the magnificent seven are all lined up for marquee fights in 2008, when Frankie Gavin leads Britain's resurgent amateurs to the Beijing Olympics.

Less tangibly, there is a sense of the British public embracing boxing again, perhaps because pugilism has lost its capacity to shock the squeamish in a society where teenagers are shooting each other dead. Hatton's world, though, will be governed by self-reproach and sorrow for a few more days. Or weeks.

A fighter spends the first chunk of his career constructing an edifice of indomitability and the last part examining the rubble of his own self-image. Mayweather will probably never have to face those emotions. Of all the world's fighters, only the fearsome Miguel Cotto stands before him as a credible threat.

Yet, Hatton will soon be engaged in the delicate work of reassembling his shattered confidence. The memory of what Mayweather did to him in the eighth and 10th rounds will never leave him, especially if he persists with his belief that a point-deduction for fouling cost him the fight by turning him wild.

Really, Mayweather merely proved that he could beat Hatton in a roughhouse as well as he could at art, and a more salient issue is whether the English booing of the anthem worked against the challenger, not least by offending the referee.

In a small gathering Hatton did concede that 'the better man won'.

And in his journey back to the lightwelterweight (10st) division he left us with a promise: 'I feel a bit of mug, because I committed the cardinal sin of losing my rag.

'I'll be damned if Ricky Hatton is going to finish with him being knocked out in the last fight of his career. No way.'