By Clayton Goodwin
In the late hours of 22nd January 1973 my work-colleague Tim McCarthy and myself settled into our seats in a cinema close to Victoria station in London to watch the closed-circuit live coverage coming to us from the world heavyweight boxing championship match in Kingston, Jamaica. We brought a bottle of whiskey with us to pass the evening, Following his victory over Muhammad Ali, champion Joe Frazier was a firm favourite to defeat the challenge of Olympic laureate George Foreman. It was considered to be a smart move by Frazier to meet, and quell, the threat of the younger man, a fearsome puncher, before he reached his full potential. Yet such was the Texan’s strength that it was expected he would extend the hard-punching champion into the latter part of the contest. For that we intended to take a sip of the whiskey between the rounds.
In the event, such was the brevity of the action that we managed only one sip apiece. Hardly likely to get tipsy on that. Foreman came out of his corner and blasted Joe away in the second round, after scoring six knockouts. My grandad’s generation must have felt something similar when Jack Dempsey and Luis Angel Firpo set about each other. I do not know what happened to the rest of the bottle and assume that Tim took it home with him – after all, he had probably bought it, and, when drinking alone, I always prefer beer to spirits or wine. I was indeed alone, without any liquid sustenance, when having changed residence in the meanwhile, I turned up in a cinema at Lewisham to watch the similar coverage of Foreman’s title defence against Muhammad Ali on 30th October 1974. That was the famous Rumble In The Jungle in Kinshasa. More words have been written and spoken about that fight than any other contest in fistic history, so that anything I could have added would be superfluous.
Since then George Foreman seems to have been always with us in some guise or the other, whether it be preacher, renewed heavyweight in his Second Coming , proponent for a grill-machine, or as a kindly grandfatherly figure. When he died recently aged 76 years just a few weeks ago, it seemed that an entire slice of my younger life had been cut away. Sport produces heroes that we can cheer, and villains we can jeer, but Foreman is probably the only man who has given us both in one lifetime. His passing, too, brought a closure to the greatest Golden Age that the heavyweight division has ever known. Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali and George Foreman have crossed over the great divide to join the kindly Floyd Patterson and menacing Sonny Liston. Only Larry Holmes remains to provide us with an echo from that glorious past.
Much of my knowledge of that time came from reading, and listening to, the reports of Colin Hart, the supreme boxing reporter of his generation, who passed away aged 89 years on the same weekend as Foreman took his own quietus. Colin came from the East End of London, the heart of boxing in the UK, and it showed in his work – and that is a compliment. If you may excuse the pun, Mr Hart got to the heart of the sport with an empathetic understanding of the participants and an aptitude for transferring his feelings and observations to his readership. His contemporary and colleague, Alan Hubbard, with whom Colin’s name will always be associated, had bowed out of our lives a couple of years earlier. We shall never see their likes again – and that can be said with greater certainty that usual.
Many years when we were much younger Colin and my own paths had crossed in an entirely different way. He was interested in, and visited, a young lady who was lodging with us. I was the geezer who opened the door to him and, sometimes, showed him out. When we met up again several decades later, Hart gave no sign that he recognised me from that time, but, then, why should he – he was the one who had become famous, not me. And I never raised the point with him, because, primarily, I was too intent on listening to his well-told stories.
Incidentally, that young lady went on to marry a member of the minor nobility, whereas Colin Hart proceeded to become a major figure in the nobility of the “noble art of self-defence”. Boxing is often derided by those who should know better, and as long as it can continue to produce figures like George Foreman and Colin Hart it deserves to continue for a long time yet.