'The gift I received last week from Ricky summed up the man he truly was. He was and always will be the People’s Champion'

I unwrapped the package and out dropped a beautiful, signed poster of Ricky Hatton.

Young, and in the early stages of his career, it was a stunning picture of a man who would go on to become a champion and one of Britain’s best boxing stars.

For anyone who ever met Ricky, and I was lucky enough to both interview him and spend time in his company socially, it’s impossible to believe he’s been taken so young.

Ricky was always so full of life, so funny, so positive.

Always moving and always looking forward. It’s how he approached boxing. And it’s how he approached every single day of his life.

I first met Ricky way back in 2004 when I was a trainee reporter on the Lancashire Evening Post in Preston.

I was covering his visit to a prison in the county where he was putting on a demonstration of his boxing skills.

That was why, as he became more and more successful in the ring, he quickly became a national treasure.

His front-foot, relentless style made watching him fight addictive. Ricky would be the first to admit he wasn’t the world’s stylist fighter. But nobody worked harder than he did.

He won his first world title in 2005, a year after that prison visit, when he stunned the Australian boxer Kosta Tszyu at the Manchester Arena.

He then went on to be involved in two of this century’s biggest bouts involving a British fighter when he faced Floyd Mayweather Jr and Manny Pacquiao. Although he lost both fights, he was followed thousands of miles to America by fans who adored his bravery in the ring and his all-action style and down-to-earth persona.

I got to know Ricky again after his retirement in 2012 when I worked on a major mental health campaign with my friend, the retired World Champion Frank Bruno.

Frank and Ricky were incredibly close, with Frank often travelling to spend time with Ricky in Manchester.

They’d often train together, but they also spent a lot of time just enjoying one another’s company as well as attending boxing dinners and fundraising dinners.

In his retirement, Ricky took part in hundreds of events both in the UK and overseas, talking about his career.

I’ve watched and listened to countless retired sportsmen stand and speak at dinners and charity functions.

Ricky was, without question, the funniest I’ve ever seen.

Anyone who has ever been present at one of his events will know he could easily have been a stand-up comedian.

He was brutally honest too. His struggles outside the boxing ring following retirement were well-documented.

Like Frank has done, Ricky found retirement very hard.

Ricky kindly agreed to talk about his demons in the two memoirs I wrote with Frank about his life, Let Me Be Frank and Sixty Years A Fighter.

One section which saw him reflect on Frank’s own battle with mental ill health now feels particularly poignant.

“To see what Big Frank has gone through in the five years since 2012 just breaks my heart,” Ricky wrote.

“If someone had put me in a hospital and locked the door, I would have probably tried to smash it down. Then I would have legged it. But Frank has battled his illness like a champion. He didn’t run away. He stood and he fought it. And in the end, he won.

“That was not a surprise to me, after all it is the only way he knows. He is a warrior. I was proud that only a few weeks after Frank came out of hospital in 2015, he decided to pop into my gym in Manchester.

“The night before Frank turned up, I was like a kid at Christmas. I could hardly sleep, I was so excited about the thought of spending some time with him in the ring. Growing up he was my hero. Big Frank and Nigel Benn: they were gods to me, and I idolised the pair of them.”

Ricky, you were idolised too. Idolised for being a man of the people. Idolised for being the People’s Champion. Idolised, for being you.