Immersed in boxing from boyhood, Reg Gutteridge became one of the world’s most authoritative television commentators on the sport and was the long-time correspondent of the London Evening News, building up a particularly close relationship with Muhammad Ali. Although he always concentrated on boxing, Gutteridge also reported on sports as wideranging as football, greyhound racing and tug-of-war and covered six Olympic Games. His several awards as a commentator included the Sam Taub prize for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism, annually presented in the United States.

He was brought up in Islington, London. His grandfather, Arthur, was the first professional boxer to appear at the National Sporting Club, the organisation, that did much to regularise boxing with gloves in Britain. His father, Dick, and uncle, Jack, were the Gutteridge twins, who were recognised as the leading seconds and trainers in this country in the 1920s and 1930s. Reg’s first cousin, Jack, also taught boxing and later became celebrated as a professional wrestler under the name of Jackie “Mr TV” Pallo.

Reg himself was an amateur flyweight but any hopes he had of fulfilling his potential ended with a crippling wound in the Second World War. Conscripted in 1942 as a foot soldier by the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, he was fighting in Normandy two days after D-Day, when he was ordered in an emergency to jump, together with the rest of his detachment, from a moving tank. The other soldiers dropped safely on one side of the vehicle but Gutteridge landed on a mine and the explosion blew off his left leg. He was never embarrassed by wearing an artificial leg and often used it as a source for jokes. Once, in San Remo, Italy, he emerged from a dip in the sea, hopping on one leg, having left his prosthetic limb under a towel on the beach, shouting “shark, shark”.

Determined to become a boxing reporter, he joined the Evening News, then the dominant London paper, as a copy boy. He progressed to becoming boxing correspondent and was still with the newspaper when it closed in 1980. By this time Gutteridge had become a regular on World of Sport on ITV, at the time vying with the BBC’s Grandstand for viewers on Saturday afternoons. He also formed a memorable commentating partnership with Jim Watt, the former world lightweight champion. The pair blended information with entertainment, becoming nationally known figures to television audiences, until ITV stopped screening boxing in the 1990s.

Over nearly 50 years Gutteridge wrote about and later commentated on all the famous figures in the sport, ranging in time from Sugar Ray Robinson to Lennox Lewis. Ali, who enjoyed a more cordial relationship with the British rather than the American press, was a favourite. In one bout in Jakarta, Ali even invited Gutteridge to his corner so he could give the television viewers the benefit of his comments between rounds. In the 1980s, when Ali came to Britain to promote a video of his contests, he asked for Gutteridge at a press conference and, on being told that he was seriously ill in a hospital in Hammersmith, he immediately travelled across London to his bedside. Ali’s unannounced arrival caused astonishment in the ward and when Gutteridge woke up, he found the former world champion sitting beside him. “I thought I was hallucinating,” Gutteridge recalled later.

As well as his commentating and journalism, he also was a popular after-dinner speaker, and ghosted the biography of Terry Downes, the former world middleweight champion. His own autobiography, Uppercuts and Dazes, on which he collaborated with his colleague Peter Batt, was full of hilarious reminiscences and for which Ali provided the foreword.

Gutteridge was appointed OBE in 1995 and was also inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame and the World Boxing Hall of Fame.

He is survived by his wife and a daughter. Another daughter predeceased him.

Reg Gutteridge, OBE, boxing correspondent and commentator, was born on March 29, 1924. He died on on January 24, 2009, aged 84