NORMAN GILLER, once our resident columnist here at the SJA and a Lifetime Member, remembers his old mate Colin Hart, the legendary boxing reporter who passed away at the weekend, aged 89…
BY NORMAN GILLER
So there I was, 17 in 1957, covering my first East London juvenile court for the Stratford Express.
The court usher showed me to my seat. I started taking notes in my recently learned Pitman’s shorthand. Suddenly this very confident, cocky even, young man chewing on a matchstick confronted me and asked, ‘What you doing, son?’
‘Reporting for the Stratford Express “ I said proudly.
‘So why are you sitting with the defendants?’ he queried.
I’d looked so young the usher had put me in the dock!
The young man who rescued me was 21-year-old Colin Hart of the East London News Agency. We later worked together on the Daily Herald that morphed into the broadsheet and then Murdoch’s tabloid Sun. He was night news editor who became The Sun’s exceptional boxing and athletics man… and a lifelong pal.
Colin had fought pancreatic cancer for several years, but finally succumbed on Saturday, a huge Fleet Street oak cut down aged 89.
That matchstick he was chewing the day we met was a permanent companion for much of his reporting life as his way of not smoking, because he was terrified of catching the very disease that finally beat him.
If there has been a finer all-round journalist, then I have not met him. He was crime reporter and then night news editor at the Herald in Long Acre when we first worked together, and when the broadsheet Sun launched, I moved on to the Daily Express while Colin switched from the desk to a reporting role as boxing and athletics correspondent.
The launch of Murdoch’s tabloid Sun coincided with the Fight of the Century, when Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle. Colin went against most informed opinion and forecast that Ali would win. It was an early sign that he knew his boxing.
How chilling that Colin departed this mortal coil in the same week as the great George Foreman, whom he wrote about throughout his long boxing career.
Colin and I had been boxing fanatics from our schooldays, both of us growing up in the East End where ’hungry fighters’ was not a metaphor but a statement of fact. We were both vying for the job of Sun boxing writer when I was head hunted for a football reporting role on the Daily Express.
He remained at The Sun to become a legend, both as the best informed of all boxing reporters and an athletics expert who was equally at home writing about the Olympics (he covered eight of them) or sitting at the ringside at a small hall boxing promotion.
I later became a boxing PR, feeding Colin facts and figures but despite our closeness I could never get him to toe the party line. He was always an honest and forthright boxing pundit with his own strong opinions and who became famous on both side of the Atlantic for his knowledge and contacts.
Colin used to not only write about the great sportsmen, but would befriend them. Everybody liked him, and among his best contacts were Lord Seb Coe, Muhammad Ali, Sir Henry Cooper and Linford Christie. He was I am sure the only reporter known to both Dame Kelly Holmes and world heavyweight boxing champion Larry Holmes.
Proud of his Jewish heritage, Colin was a life-long West Ham United fan. The moment that cemented his fame on both sides of the pond came in 2013 when he achieved the rare honour of being voted into the Boxing Hall of Fame in America.
He was inseparable from another Fleet Street great in Ken Jones, whose famous writing daughter Lesley-Ann recalls: “Colin was such a fixture of my childhood that I cannot remember a time when he wasn’t in our lives. He and my Dad were lifelong friends. They zigzagged the world together covering prize fights – the Rumble in the Jungle, the Thrilla in Manila. He delivered the eulogy at Dad’s funeral five years ago and knew the clock was ticking for him but refused to give in. Like my Dad, a giant of sporting journalism. They will now be together at the bar.”
Rest easy, Colin, my old friend and love to your American-born, wonderful wife Cindy and daughters Laura and Lisa.
Life’s race well run, life’s duty done, now cometh rest.
Come on you Irons!
Colin Hart memorial service details
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