By Shaun Brown
The veteran scribe was best known for his work at The Sun. In 1969, he started as their boxing correspondent, a career that lasted over 50 years. Hart retired in 2000 after 31 years, but he continued as a columnist.
Born in West Ham, East London, Hart’s love for boxing was born when his Grandmother took him to his first professional fight at 10 years old.
Speaking to Boxing News in 2020, Hart said: “I boxed at school and at the youth club, but I realised very early on that I wasn’t very good at it. I got sick to the death of being given nosebleeds!”
Hart’s career brought him to the most iconic fights and to conversations with the sport’s biggest names. On March 8, 1971, Hart was at Madison Square Garden on his first American assignment for The Sun, covering the “Fight of the Century” between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.
His extensive coverage continued his global ringside presence for Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Thomas Hearns I, Ali vs. Frazier III and many more, plus notable fights involving British stars Ken Buchanan, Lennox Lewis, Joe Calzaghe and Ricky Hatton.
Hart came from an era where journalists would dictate a running report to a copytaker. It was then up to the reporters to do a rewrite and fill in the blanks with quotes.
“You’d be on the phone from around eight o’clock until midnight, near enough,” he said. “It was very stressful on a big fight night, but let’s face it, we all loved it. And the facilities for reporting were better back then than they are now. We’d always have our own telephone and a desk to work on.”
Widely respected in the boxing community, Hart’s career was also rewarded with accolades, including the Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism from the Boxing Writers Association of America (BWAA) in 2011. Hart was the first British writer to win the award, and this milestone was noted in his Hall of Fame induction in 2013.
Recounting his most memorable interview during a conversation with BN Hart recalled a trip to Las Vegas in November 1987 to cover Julio Cesar Chavez vs Edwin Rosario. The lauded Mexican had moved up from super featherweight to lightweight to challenge the Puerto Rican for his WBA lightweight title.
However, Hart was also in Vegas to interview Mike Tyson, but it was a chance meeting with ‘The Greatest’, which Hart recalled fondly.
“While I was out there, I was standing by the newsstand minding my own business when Ali came along. By this point he’d been retired for six years and it’d been made public that he had Parkinson’s disease. We started talking and I said to him that I was sorry to hear that he had Parkinson’s. Without any prompting, he said to me, ‘I’m a man, not a god. And I’m not afraid to die.’
“When he walked away, I ran up to my room and wrote everything down that I could remember from our conversation. As you can imagine, that was one hell of a splash in The Sun the next day. Often, the best interviews are the ones you don’t plan for.”
Everyone at Boxing News extends heartfelt condolences to the Hart family, friends, and fans worldwide.
