MANILA, Philippines - The knockout that Ricky Hatton suffered in the heavy hands of Manny Pacquiao was no ordinary knockout.
Because in the eyes of a medical expert, the pride of Manchester who went down cold after taking a solid left hook to the jaw showed signs of seizure while he lay motionless on the canvas.
Dr. Rolando Jeremillo Jr., an ortho surgeon and medical director of the Ambica Biotechnologies here in the Philippines, is no boxing expert. But he surely knows his way around the brutal sport.
“I’ve seen a lot of knockouts, and some big ones, too. But what Ricky Hatton suffered was a different one. It was a scary knockout,” said Jeremillo, who saw the fight live on pay-per-view.
“There are knockouts where the boxers fall hard and wobble on the way up. And there are knockouts of this kind, where the boxers, in this case Hatton, lose consciousness for a brief time.”
Based on his observation, Hatton appeared to have lost his consciousness even before he hit the blue canvas of the MGM Grand that was packed to the rafters. His eyes rolled, breathed heavily and hardly moved for some time.
“To me, it looked like a seizure right there and then,” observed Jeremillo.
No wonder Hatton’s fiancée, Jennifer Dooley, was almost hysterical at ringside, being consoled by the girlfriend of the boxer’s brother, Matthew. His parents, Ray and Carol, were also at ringside.
A seizure, according to wikipedia, can last few seconds, and are often associated with a sudden and involuntary contraction of a group of muscles and loss of consciousness.
As Pacquiao and his fans celebrated, ring physicians attended to Hatton who appeared to be in a very dangerous state. It took a few minutes before he managed to get up.
He was later taken to the Valley Hospital in Las Vegas, underwent brain scan and few other tests before being cleared. The day after he was at the pool area of the MGM, cooling off.
Jeremillo can only hope that the worst is over for Hatton. He said punches like that may cause Parkinson’s disease, the same one which fighters like Muhammad Ali or even Freddie Roach suffers from.
“It may come 10 or 20 years from now. But even if Hatton retires tomorrow, he just became a candidate for Parkinson’s (a disease that causes movement disorders),” said Jeremillo.