Colin Hart, the great boxing writer and raconteur whose career as The Sun’s boxing correspondent earned him top accolades died earlier in March, and with him a part of boxing’s past went with him.

Hart, so authoritative and forthright in his opinions that he was an outlet that laid a legitimate claim at being The Voice of Boxing – was the last British writer alive who had been ringside at the Fight of the Century and the Rumble in the Jungle. He had covered the sport in vast detail to a newspaper audience that topped out at more than four million in The Sun’s heyday.

But he was aware that time had moved on. He would speak about dwindling print circulations, yet always took pride in being one of Fleet Street’s finest. He was a newspaperman at heart, and a boxing man, too.

Fortunately, before his untimely death at the age of 89, he had spent time going over his career in more recent years with journalists – including me – telling stories of his incredible life in boxing for websites and podcasts. 

There have been many heartfelt tributes paid to Hart, and understandably so, but there are a few stories Colin regaled me with that are worth sharing (actually, there are many, but I thought I’d share some that particularly stood out).

Once, he asked me whether I had the phone numbers of Anthony Joshua or Floyd Mayweather. I told him that I did not, and he started to explain why he asked, and remembered a trip he made to Los Angeles in the 1980s.

“So, we’ve got time to kill, and the big boys [leading journalists] said – about eight of us – let’s go and rest up. [We had] some R&R in LA. So, we jumped on the commuter flight, get into LA, get into a hotel, sit around the pool, typical journalists, what other people would think was paradise, we were moaning and groaning, bored to tears, and then somebody said, ‘What if Ali’s in town?’. We all had Ali’s private phone number. So, we said, ‘Right, this is late at night, someone ring him in the morning, see if he’s in’. The man designated was [broadcaster] Jim Rosenthal, who was then BBC Radio. Eight o’clock in the morning, Jim’s banging on all our doors saying, ‘Get up, Ali wants to see us now’. 

“We jump into two cabs. He’s living in a gated community off Wilshire Boulevard. He said to Jim, ‘The British press are in town, come and see me’.

“He told security – armed security at this gated community – to expect us. We went in. He was standing on the steps of his mansion in a black shirt, black slacks, pair of black army boots, standing on the steps waiting for us. In we went; we took a tour of the house. I mean, we all wrote this – I’m not making this up, it’s in cuttings. People think, when I tell them this, that I’m making it up, right? They think I’m bullshitting. 

“He gives us a tour of the house, inside his trophy room, where he had been given gifts by heads of state from all over the world, which he chucked in one room. Then he took us upstairs along a long corridor with a big oak door at the end. And as we were like the Pied Piper in single file behind him, he got to the door and he went, ‘Shh’, opened the door; stuck his head in. We could hear him murmuring. He told Veronica, who was then his third wife, the most beautiful creature you’ve ever seen, to get out of bed. He wanted to show the British press the master bedroom. Now, people said, ‘Oh, come on, you’re making it up’. I swear by all, everything… That is Ali… memories… there are a million of them.”

Just one more on Ali, then, for old time’s sake. Hart and his dear friend, the late Alan Hubbard, had a delayed flight to Dublin to cover Ali’s press conference with Al “Blue” Lewis.
Their flight from Heathrow was delayed and they missed the press conference, so Hubbard and Hart – for 50 years partners in boxing – grabbed a cab and raced to Ali’s hotel, a country club on the outskirts of the city.
“There was Angelo Dundee, his brother, who was Chris, the promoter, a lovely woman, Ali’s mother, Odessa, and his old man, and his brother,” Hart recalled. “No Ali. So Angelo said, ‘Hi guys, what are you doing here?’.

“We told him we missed the press conference. He said, ‘Oh’. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘where’s Ali?’.

He said, ‘He’s got a bit of a cold, and he’s gone to bed’. 

“Oh my God,” said Hart, fearing they would leave empty handed.

“Our papers are waiting for big lumps on Ali. 

“He said, ‘Well go…’ and – exact words – ‘Well go and wake the motherfucker up’.

“Really?” gasped Hart.

“Really,” the coach confirmed.

“So we marched down the corridor, banged on Ali’s door and we heard, ‘Get up, Champ. The British press are here’.

“He got out of bed, he was sharing a room with Rahaman [his brother], opened the door, bleary-eyed, suffering from a cold and says, ‘Come in, fellas…’.

“Two-and-a-half hours later we left… I mean, it was the most fascinating two-and-a-half hours as you can imagine.

“Could you imagine doing that to Anthony Joshua or Mike Tyson even? I mean, as I said, the people who look after Anthony Joshua would have a heart attack at the thought of it.

If you asked for two-and-a-half hours. Two-and-a-half minutes they won’t give you.”

Not all heavyweight champions were so appreciative of Hart. He could be prickly, including telling the old, vicious version of George Foreman to ‘Say please’ once when he ordered the gruff east Londoner to put a cigarette out. He also took incoming fire from Ali’s heavyweight successor, Larry Holmes. He and Holmes figured out their differences over the years, but Hart recalled a night where, “I had a right go at him”.

Then, he explained: “The night he made that remark to [Rocky] Marciano’s children about Marciano not being able to hold his jockstrap... When he lost, debatably, to [Michael] Spinks, when he was about to equal Marciano’s record. He thought he was robbed. And Marciano’s children – grown up, adult children – were there [at the post-fight press conference]. And he made that very crude remark. Again, in front of the children, which made it even worse for me. Anyway, late that night, with Pat Putnam of Sports Illustrated, I went up to Holmes’ bedroom. And he was lying in bed. And he knew he’d made a stupid, stupid mistake in the worst possible taste. He knew. He’s not dumb. He knew. And he could see.

“People like him don’t take things back, but he knew, deep down, he shouldn’t have said it.

“Anyway, he looked at me. And that look on my face, I suppose, wasn’t approving. And he looked at me and he said, ‘You gotta problem?’ 

“I said, ‘Larry, you are so stupid’. And he said, ‘What do you mean?’. I said, ‘Not only did you insult a legend in front of his children, you insulted a white legend in front of his children’.

“I didn’t say anymore. He knew.”

Colin was known as “Harty” to his many friends. He was, for years, the centrepiece of the Boxing Writers’ Club, ever present at press conferences, and respected by the generations that followed him.

He also had a lifetime of heavyweight memories, and not just with Ali. 

For instance, there was a time when trainer Terry Lawless was taking Frank Bruno to a press conference and misjudged the time, potentially leaving Bruno to kick his heels for hours. In conversation, Hart told Lawless that Bruno could stay at his house to eat up the clock until the time came for him to go where he needed to be. Hart was at work in the office, Colin’s kids were at school, and Cindy, Colin’s wife, knew who Bruno was. Bruno accepted the offer.

“So, I said to Cindy, guess who’s coming to dinner?” Hart smiled.

“I said, ‘Look, when the girls come home from school, tell them they’ve got to be quiet. No noise. He’ll be asleep up there and resting’.

“I said, ‘Put him in our bedroom’. So she takes Frank upstairs, gave him his own pillow and a blanket. And it was daylight, obviously, at four in the afternoon, whenever it was. Anyway, she makes Terry a cup of tea downstairs. And what had happened, Frank wanted to darken the room, but he didn’t realize the curtains were on pulleys. So he tried, and they wouldn’t budge. Bit harder, they wouldn’t budge. He’s gone…”, Colin by now motions a yank of said curtains, “...he’s pulled everything down. Fittings and the lot. And downstairs, then they hear crash, bang, wallop.

“They run to the foot of the stairs. You know what happened? And big Bruno was standing at the top, and he’s saying, ‘I’m very sorry, Cindy. I’ve had an accident’.”

Colin loved that story, and understandably so. Frank enjoys it, too, it must be said. 

As the years rolled by, Hart was rewarded for being Fleet Street’s finest.

There might have been a time when accolades did not mean too much to him, but he always appreciated the most those that came from his peers and there were two awards that stood out to him.

“Two career highs, I put them on an equal footing,” he told me. “The Nat Fleischer Award in the United States is given by the American boxing writers, right? Until I got in, it was won by two British writers,” he said of the prestigious BWAA lifetime award.

“I’m the first Englishman to win it. The first writer to win it was the late Hugh McIlvanney, who was a Scotsman. The second one to win it was Ken Jones, who was a Welshman.

“I am the third British, but the first and only Englishman to have been awarded it. Now, to be awarded by your peers, it is considered very high – unheard of in this country – but considered very, very highly in the United States. And as I’ve got an American wife, I always feel I have one foot in the US as well.

“And then, the following year, I was inducted into the [International Boxing] Hall of Fame in Canastota. And very few Brits… Hugh McIlvanney, Reg Gutteridge, Harry Carpenter posthumously, and myself, I think, are the only Brits [in the observer category].”

It is a shame Colin never committed his stories to paper. He could have written a fine book, but acknowledged being both “bone idle” and “rather mercenary”, despite many imploring him to do so. 

“But, as I say, my mercenary side comes out – all that hard work, research, to do it properly, and there’s very little financial reward at the end of it,” he said, quite correctly.

He didn’t think his children or grandchildren would be particularly interested in a boxing book, either, but he had not closed the door on the idea, even in his late eighties.

“I’m not too old not to do it – and when I say I’m not too old, I probably am too old,” he said. “I’ve still some life left. I think if I had no work to do, then maybe I would do it, because I must be doing something. I was very lucky that when I left the paper, the staff of the paper, they asked me to continue writing for them – to do just a general column on boxing. 

“I was doing it every week. It’s now every two weeks, which I love doing. It keeps me involved. It keeps me going to press conferences. Going to the fights. And I say I don’t travel anymore, which I’m afraid – in this day and age – I regard as a blessing. I mean, what with my coverage of athletics and boxing, I never saw my daughters grow up, to be honest. My wife brought my daughters up. I was always traveling. Maybe the paper shouldn’t know this, but I used to travel very well, I used to travel long haul, first, [or] nothing less than business class, stay at five-star hotels. And when I left the paper, they probably didn’t know this, I had 1.4 million air miles. I had three trips on concorde. So, you know, I’ve been blessed in that sense.”

Blessed is the word. Boxing was a different world back then. So was the newspaper business. The British dailies had incredible sway, power and pull, and Harty tugged many of the strings. 

But he knew how fortunate he had been. It had been a wondrous journey, decorated with the highest awards, spending time with legends who are inducted in Canastota alongside him. While he had a few stories about some of them, a few of them had stories they could share about Colin Hart.

And for Colin, his wonderful life – all 89 years of it – went before him in the blink of an eye.

“I mean, you just took it day by day, week by week, month by month,” he said to me once.

“And the time goes. And yeah, suddenly you find out you’ve been doing it three years; five years; 10 years. I mean, I was 30 years as a boxing – 31 years as a boxing correspondent – until I was forced to retire. In those days, in the year 2000, when you reached the age of 65, you had to retire. But I was very lucky. They said to me, ‘Look, we don’t want to lose you completely. Would you write us a regular boxing column?’

“And I snapped their hands off because I’m a great believer in what Ernest Hemingway said, ‘The most obnoxious word in the English language is retirement’. I never wanted to retire.”

He never did. Colin Hart was at events, on the phone – his landline – all the way up to his death having left his own indelible five-decades-long mark on the sport.