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.