Colin Hart was The Sun’s ‘Voice of Boxing’, he witnessed Ali & Frazier to AJ and Fury and was a world-renowned authority

THE first time we met was in the stairwell at Flying Eze’s former HQ in Wapping, where the smokers would congregate.

Colin Hart was an ex-smoker, allowing himself a few passive fumes, chewing a matchstick in place of a cigarette, having recently recovered from throat cancer.

Smoking was bad for your health. Especially when Harty angered one particular interviewee by lighting up as they spoke.

That man was George Foreman, the heavyweight champion of the world, who asked him to extinguish his cigarette.

When Harty demanded that he should ‘say please’, Foreman threatened to punch him. A PR man saved him from a good hiding. But Foreman, like so many other greats, would end up becoming a good friend of Colin.

Harty spoke out of the opposite side of his mouth to the matchstick. He spoke in his native Cockney. And once you got to know him, he’d speak about decades of rich sporting history.

He spoke of Muhammad Ali and the Rumble in the Jungle, of Sugar Ray Leonard and the ‘Four Kings’ of the middleweight division.

He spoke of Ben Johnson’s failed drugs test in Seoul and the massacre of 13 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists in Munich, as well as many lighter tales from the eight Olympic Games he’d covered.

According to his former colleague Alex Montgomery, he was ‘the only East End Jewish boy I ever knew who had a love of showjumping’.

Harty spoke of giving as good as he got to some of the most charismatic and egotistical men in the world. Of the thrill of chasing a tale or an interview. Of the glorious chaos which exists when a major story breaks, at some ungodly hour, in some far flung part of the globe.

And when he spoke, you listened. And if, like me, you grew up loving sport and history and newspapers, you always wanted to ask him more.

Harty was cussed at first but soon he became warm and generous and funny and utterly authoritative.

Our first meeting was more than a quarter of a century ago, and it was 30 years after Harty had taken up the role of boxing and athletics correspondent on Flying Eze’s very first day back in 1969 – an association which would last for 56 years.

He ‘retired’ when he turned 65 in 2000. Yet he carried on writing columns for this newspaper for another 25 years, right up until his death, and he continued to attend countless world title fights.

Immediately after the many major fights I’ve covered, I’ve sought out Harty and asked for his expert view and often for some historical context.

He was a great help to me, as he had been to Flying Eze’s only three previous Chief Sports Writers; Peter Batt, John Sadler and Steven Howard.

With a good-natured sneer, Harty would call us ‘the instant experts’, who’d parachute in to cover the biggest stories, using the genuine expertise of Harty and his fellow specialists to make ourselves look good.

Like few other major sporting events, the excitement of covering a world-class prize fight can make your head spin. The benefit of Harty’s wisdom and experience was always valued.

In 2017, after Anthony Joshua had knocked out Wladimir Klitschko in an epic fight at Wembley, he told me the bout ranked in the top ten he had witnessed.

Given that he had covered all of the fights between Ali, Foreman and Smokin’ Joe Frazier, as well as those between Leonard and Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Tommy ‘The Hitman’ Hearns and Roberto Duran, this was a relief, because I worried I’d over-egged it while filing copy ‘live’.

Still, I must have been too gushing in my praise of Joshua because the next time we met, Harty gave me a gentle verbal cuffing and told me that Tyson Fury was better than Joshua. And he was right.

The last time we met was in Riyadh last year, when Oleksandr Usyk had inflicted Fury’s first professional defeat, as Harty had predicted he would.

Promoter Frank Warren had flown Harty over and put him up in accommodation far grander than anything granted to today’s working hacks, which delighted him.

For two decades or so, we shared a running private joke.

“When are you going to write that book?”; I’d ask him.

“Who’d wanna read that?”; he’d reply.

Yet any fan would want to read the definitive account of one of sportswriting’s greatest careers.

A couple of years ago, he did write that book, at least one covering the boxing part of his career. With the help of fellow journalist Brian Doogan, he wrote ‘The Voice of Boxing: 60 Years At Ringside’.

But in these pages, he continued to write several books’ worth of great reminiscences, as well as razor-sharp analysis of the current fight game.

That book tells it all about a Londoner who experienced the Blitz as a young child and who would end up ringside with Frank Sinatra at the ‘Fight of the Century’ between Ali and Frazier.

While Harty was a boxing aficionado, with a deep well of experience and knowledge about the sweet science, he fully understood the brutality of the game and the controversy over its very existence.

After covering the death of the popular 24-year-old Welsh bantamweight Johnny Owen, inside a Los Angeles ring in 1980, he wanted to quit covering boxing, only to be talked round by colleagues.

Later he would witness the fearful beatings inflicted upon Michael Watson and Gerald McClellan, which caused life-changing injuries.

Harty held immense respect for those brave enough to step inside the ring and while he might criticise a performance, he never doubted a boxer’s courage.

On the day when Harty first entered Flying Eze’s newsroom in 1969, he offered to help a bloke with an Aussie accent who was shifting furniture around, only to find out the ‘removals man’ was Rupert Murdoch.

For five and a half decades, he was this newspaper’s ‘voice of boxing’ and plenty more besides.

By the time of his death, just days before his 90th birthday, he would be the last serving member of the sports desk’s original staff.

Colin’s death is a chance to reflect on a golden age for boxing, for newspapers and for all sport.

While Colin was a match-going West Ham supporter for more than 80 years, and would frequently advise us football writers from his seat near the old Upton Park press box, he never covered football professionally.

So rich was the sporting landscape, before the advent of the Premier League dwarfed the popularity of all other sports, that he didn’t need to.

And his love for ‘them ‘Ammers’ – and ‘what about them ‘Ammers, eh, Col?’ – remained unsullied by professional cynicism as a result.

Colin was a great reporter, wordsmith, story-getter and story-teller.

And there was one piece of his advice that came to mind today, as I recall the pleasure of having known him for more than 25 years.

“Always be kind to the young kids coming up in this industry,”; he told me, “you never know who they’ll get to write your bleeding obituary.”;