Overview

From Madison Square Garden to Manila, Kinshasa to Kuala Lumpur, Caesars Palace in Las Vegas to York Hall, Bethnal Green, Colin Hart has spent a lifetime reporting on the biggest names in boxing from ringsides around the world. He has gone toe-to-toe in print and in person with every world heavyweight champion from Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali to Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua, becoming known through his regular column for The Sun newspaper as The Voice of Boxing. In 60 years at ringside he has mixed with and reported on big fight legends such as George Foreman, Joe Frazier, Larry Holmes, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns, Roberto Duran, Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis, Evander Holyfield, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, as well as the best of British boxing. Born four years prior to the outbreak of World War Two, he experienced The Blitz and went underground with his family every night to escape the devastation it wrought. As a boy growing up in London's East End, his idols were Jack 'Kid' Berg and Ted 'Kid' Lewis, local heroes who became world champions. Ultimately, Hart followed in their footsteps, albeit from the safe side of the ropes, but pulled no punches along the way as the likes of even the heavyweight trio of Foreman, Lewis and Tyson along with many others discovered. From being ringside with Frank Sinatra at The Fight of the Century, the monumental first meeting between Ali and Frazier, to breaking one of his most sacrosanct rules of journalism by celebrating the moment of Foreman's fabled fall at Ali's hands under an African night sky, Hart tells in-depth the inside stories from all his years in boxing. He was in the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles on the tragic night that Wales's Matchstick Man, Johnny Owen, lost his life trying to realise the dream of being world champion and reported on Michael Watson's brave fight when his life lay in the balance after his devastating knockout loss to Chris Eubank at White Hart Lane and forty days in a coma. I am conscious that not everybody shares my enthusiasm for boxing and sometimes even my own fascination for the fights has almost ebbed away beyond the point of no return, Hart acknowledges. But boxing runs deep in his blood and has done from the moment he was taken by his grandmother to see his first professional fight at West Ham Baths as a ten-year-old. More than 75 years later, these are the reflections of one of the most unflinching and authoritative voices on the hardest of sports.

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9781838133733

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Colin Hart began his Fleet Street career in 1958 as a news reporter on the Daily Herald, joined its sports department in 1962, reported on Muhammad Ali's arrival into Britain and first fight with Henry Cooper in 1963 and has covered boxing from 1964 to the present day. He was boxing correspondent of The Sun when it was first a broadsheet newspaper and took up the same role when it turned tabloid in 1969. As The Voice of Boxing, he continues to contribute a regular column for The Sun and has won multiple awards for his work, including the Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2013. Brian Doogan, who collaborated with Colin on this book, wrote the Sunday Times bestselling autobiography of Joe Calzaghe, No Ordinary Joe. He is an award-winning former Sunday Times and Daily Express sports journalist and for ten years was head of media and communications at Premier League football clubs Aston Villa and Everton. For 20 years he provided coverage on fights across Europe and the U.S. for boxing's bible, The Ring, and recently wrote the definitive story of The SuperFight: Marvelous Marvin Hagler-Sugar Ray Leonard.

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