TRUE BRIT

MANCHESTER, England -- “Three sausage, three bacon, two hash browns, two black pudding . . .”

Wait, a point of information: Black pudding is a sausage made from pig’s blood et al., but now let’s continue with manager Alison Threadgold of the wee Butty Box cafe in Hyde on the thoroughly unpretentious eastern edge of Manchester, as she reels off the items in her menu’s “Megabreakfast” . . .

” . . . two slices of Spam, two eggs, beans, mushrooms, and tomatoes, and . . . “

This Lipitor daydream goes for £4.50 ($9.26 as of Tuesday) and doubles as Ricky Hatton’s favorite meal, but hold on, she’s not finished . . .

” . . . two pieces of toast, and tea or coffee.”

So the “or” represents the lone restraint. Hatton used to down the “Mega” traditionally between adoring well-wishes on fight mornings, and breakfast at the Butty Box surely ranks among the most telltale things about Hatton.

He has earned millions boxing, he’s 43-0, he’ll fight similarly unbeaten Floyd Mayweather Jr. on Saturday night in Las Vegas for the PPBFIW title (pound-for-pound best fighter in the world, as they say), he has a whole nation loving but better yet liking him, and his favorite cafe during non-training times would be . . .

It would be the kind of outmoded sidewalk business that suburban shopping malls have slaughtered, a bastion of modesty with a painted black sign with neat pink lettering, five tables and three women toiling inside, the Chinese Delight restaurant next door, Bravo Seamstress Services after that, and Vittorio Tansella & Son Gents Hair Stylists just across Mottram Road.

“No airs or graces,” they say about the Butty Box, and about Hyde, and about Manchester, and always, always about Hatton. On a sports planet utterly besotted with PR and marketing of elite athletes, here’s a 29-year-old elite athlete who lacks the PR-and-marketing gene to such degree it’s bracing, yet has wound up wildly popular because -- because people do love the absence of PR.

“I think that’s why, to be fair, he’s so well-liked throughout the world,” said David “Duck” Owen, a New Inn pub denizen in Hatton’s home of Hattersley who has known Hatton forever. “No one could have any dirt on him ‘cause he tells it to you! That’s what’s good, because it spoils it, doesn’t it?”

It’s not just that he’ll tell about his fondness for a Guinness or several or for a fat gram or several hundred; it’s the way-it-is tone that craves no approval and dreads no disapproval. When wrapped in approachability and suitable wit, it can win over a country, especially one with a knack for realism.

“I don’t lie about a single thing,” Hatton told reporters last week on a conference call. “People say, ‘Do you like to have a drink of alcohol?’ and I say, ‘Yes, yes, of course, I love to.’ ‘And do you like fat foods?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And do you put weight on?’ ‘Yes.’ And these people are maybe a little bit more vain, would probably not admit to that, and I do.

“And I think with what you see with me, you see an honesty in my life, the way I am, period. There’s honesty in the way I train for me fights.”

In ersatz-Ali mode, Mayweather even tried the “Ricky Fatton” insult born of Hatton’s habitual cycle of Butty Box and Guinness followed by pre-fight whittling of the Butty Box and Guinness. Hatton’s reaction? “I guess he doesn’t realize I named myself ‘Ricky Fatton’ in the first place,” he said.

He’s Manchester; he’s not trying to be London.

Manchester: England’s third-largest city. The world’s first industrialized city. Home to a phenomenal late-20th century music scene. Its sky seldom seems to smile. It’s home to much of the world’s gray. Its winter wind can be hateful.

Historian A.J.P. Taylor called Manchester “the only place in England which escapes our characteristic vice of snobbery.” George Orwell went for “the belly and guts of the nation.”

Noel Gallagher of the Manchester band Oasis told the BBC in 1998, “The thing about Manchester is . . . it all comes from here.”

He pointed to the heart, deemed one of Hatton’s best hopes against Mayweather, as when Hatton warned, “I mean, if you don’t hurt me, I’ll keep coming all night.”

So while Manchester’s newer architecture might shine here and there, and its residents did once include Becks & Posh, its legacy abounds with working-class family trees like Hatton’s, said Dawn Mines of the Hattersley & Mottram Community News, where Hatton grew up.

His father, Ray, played for Manchester City in pre-lavish soccer days, and still has the carpet business where his first-born pugilist once worked. His mother, Carol, still works a carpet stall at the Glossop Market in the Peak District to the east, and has enough moxie to admit to British reporters she endures her son’s bouts by gracing her water bottle with one mixed drink of the vodka persuasion.

A mayor of Hyde once thanked Hatton at a ceremony for “remaining real.” Tommy Murtagh, the owner of the New Inn where the darts-team roster includes the 5-foot-7 Hatton, says he’s “one of the lads when he’s out with the lads, and if you saw him in the pub and you didn’t know him, you wouldn’t think he was anything special.”

And in late September during the Manchester stop on the promotional tour, Hatton memorably addressed a throng downtown on live TV, teasing Mayweather about touching him improperly and joking that while he’d missed his 6-year-old son, he’d spent the week “with another 6-year-old.”

“We apologize for the language at the moment,” a Sky voice intoned between indelicacies, as if vox populi might object.

By then, most everyone there had learned the biography and warmed to its lack of pretense. A “forceps birth” in 1978, Ricky arrived with black eyes and the midwife and doctor saying, “Oh my god, we’ve got a little bruiser here,” as Carol related in the DVD “Ricky Hatton, A Life Story.” He grew up on the vast, rolling Hattersley housing estate, which in British parlance means a government-subsidized development. Everybody called him Richard. He didn’t mind the odd scuffle.

He and his kid brother Matthew played myriad sports -- cricket, even -- and, in soccer, Murtagh said, “No one could get the ball from him.” Around age 10, his father took him to a boxing gym where the owner, Ted Peate, took a look and said to Ray, “Look at the way that bloody bag is moving.”

Early footage of the lad punching shows stunning natural prowess for a skinny blond kid.

He trained during teen years in the concrete-walled basement of the New Inn while his parents owned it before Murtagh. Owen can still remember the sounds from below -- “Bam, bam, bam” -- mixed with “all the growls he makes.” Murtagh remembers him removing his school uniform in afternoons and stocking shelves while getting teased about loving Man City to his brother’s Man United.

Long about age 15, he started working with Billy Graham, his understanding Manchester trainer with the copiously tattooed arms.

Then, all this fame, six belts in two weight classes, friendships with primo footballers such as Wayne Rooney (who has carried Hatton’s belt into the ring), but still: He lives just around the bend from his parents. He seems to pine for regularity. Owen says he’ll return from some allegedly glam trip and say, “Let’s go have a blowout,” which entails the pub. The people around Hyde adore touting him. He gets a “huge rush” from being called “the people’s champion.” The people love his lack of entourage.

They love that he walks into the New Inn alone with, “Y’all right, mate?” or jogs on Stockport Road behind the housing estate and, Mines said, “People wave at him in the car as he passes and he just waves back.”

“He’s luv-lehhhh,” said Threadgold of the Butty Box, local dialect for “lovely.”

Now thousands of Mancs make exodus to Las Vegas. Many lack tickets but don’t care. Pubs throughout Manchester, especially out east in Hyde and Hattersley, figure to stay open to the wee hours for a fight that’ll start maybe at 5 a.m.

They’re craving and even forecasting an upset, banking on Manchester heart to envision what Matthew Syed in the Times of London reckons would be “the greatest victory by a British boxer since the Marquess of Queensberry codified the sport in 1867.”

They dream that America’s frills capital could see a champion best viewed through the eyes of everyday people, one with no airs, no graces and some big ol’ “megas” upcoming at the Butty Box.

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MAIN EVENT

Floyd Mayweather Jr.

(38-0, 24 knockouts)

Ricky Hatton

(43-0, 31 knockouts)

* WBC welterweight championship fight (12 rounds).

* Saturday at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

* HBO pay-per-view, 6 p.m.