Online Reporter
LONDON. – The first time we met was in the stairwell at The Sun’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’.
He ‘retired’ when he turned 65 in 2000. Yet he carried on writing columns for The Sun 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 The Sun’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. – The Sun
