Sunday Times sports writer Hugh McIlvanney will be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame today in New York along with Lennox Lewis, the British world heavyweight champion who retired undefeated.

The ceremony marks the 20th year of the Hall of Fame’s annual celebration, which recognises boxing’s greatest exponents, non-participants and observers. As the last great heavyweight, the conqueror of Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Vitali Klitschko and every other boxer he faced in a 15-year professional career, Lewis’s legacy is secure, as is McIlvanney’s, seven times Britain’s Sports Writer of the Year and the only sports writer to receive the accolade of Journalist of the Year.

Although he has reported on World Cups and Olympic Games, prime ministers and America’s attitude to guns, an enduring fascination with fighters and their bloody business means this award has special significance.

“As someone who has found boxing irresistible since my earliest days, I consider my induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame one of the greatest honours of my career in journalism,” he said. The only other previous inductees from Britain in the observer category are Harry Mullan, former editor of Boxing News, and Reg Gutteridge, a D-Day veteran who commentated on boxing for ITV after many years as a Fleet Street journalist, both of whom are deceased.

Some of McIlvanney’s best writing was about Muhammad Ali, whom he covered from 1963 when the then Cassius Clay was floored at Wembley by Henry Cooper until his final fight in 1981 against Trevor Berbick when “the most remarkable career the game has ever known was, we must earnestly hope, brought to its final close by the tinny rattle of the Bahaimian cow-bell that was dredged up from somewhere to impersonate the timekeeper’s instrument the bungling organisers of the event had neglected to provide”.

He was ringside in Zaire for Ali’s zenith when "The Greatest" performed one of the most miraculous feats in sport by enduring the biggest blows George Foreman could throw before he knocked him out in round eight to regain the world heavyweight title.

Accompanied by Ken Jones, his friend and colleague, McIlvanney gained access to Ali’s cottage by the Congo River just a few hours following the "Rumble In The Jungle" and the stream of consciousness that flowed from the victor formed the main body of McIlvanney’s report of the fight: “’I kicked a lot of asses - not only George’s,’ he said. ’All those writers who said I was washed up, all those people who thought I had nothin’ left to offer but my mouth, all them that been against me from the start and waitin’ for me to get the biggest beatin’ of all times. They thought big bad George Foreman, the baddest man alive, could do it for them but they know better now.’ As he started the next sentence, Ali remembered the presence of his aunt, Coretta Clay, and the other cook, Lanna Shabazz, who had just been asked to ’fix two steaks and scramble about eight eggs’ for him.

"He checked himself, then shaped rather than spoke the words: ’Ah done fucked up a lot of minds.’” Ultimately, Ali’s brain damage exacted a terrible toll and McIlvanney has never shied away from the sport’s crude and questionable nature.

“Any supporter of boxing who does not admit to some residual ambivalence about its values, who has not wondered in its crueller moments if it is worth the candle, must be suspect,” he wrote in an introduction to his anthology, McIlvanney On Boxing.

The most poignant example of this was in 1979 when he found himself in a Los Angeles hospital where Welsh boxer Johnny Owen was fighting for his life having been knocked out by Mexico’s Lupe Pintor. Owen would lose his brave battle some weeks later and McIlvanney found himself thinking of his mother who was back home in Merthyr Tydfil: “She can scarcely avoid being bitter against boxing now and many who have not suffered such personal agony because of the hardest of sports will be asking once again if the game is worth the candle. Quite a few of us who have been involved with it most of our lives share the doubts.

"But our reactions are bound to be complicated by the knowledge that it was boxing that gave Johnny Owen his one positive means of self-expression. Outside the ring he was an inaudible and almost invisible personality. Inside, he became astonishingly positive and self-assured. He seemed to be more at home there than anywhere else.

"It is his tragedy that he found himself articulate in such a dangerous language.” McIlvanney’s articulacy in the same language has given his voice a lasting home in Canastota.

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