I NEVER met The Greatest, never sand danced with him at South Shields nor traded butterfly blows at press conferences – but I met the men who had.

One was Brian London, despatched in 1966. The other was Richard Dunn, the big blond Yorkshireman who fought Muhammad Ali 10 years later and by playing the champ at his own game sought to rhyme him into submission:

At 34 you aint so young

Yer going to get whupped by Richard Dunn.

Hah!

Brian London was born in West Hartlepool, his father Jack the British and Empire heavyweight champion before him. He’d already lost a world title bout against Floyd Patterson, an 11th round technical knockout, before facing Ali at Earls Court.

It lasted less than three rounds, the fight stopped after a 12-punch combination delivered in under three seconds. When we met at London’s luxurious Blackpool home 16 years ago, he still blamed himself.

“I should really have had a go and didn’t. It was the worst bit of my life. I’m not saying that I’d have beaten him because Clay (sic) was excellent, but I’d certainly have gone the distance.”

Never as pretty as Ali, he ended his career with what might be supposed a boxers’ nose. “I always worried about cauliflower ears, but my dad taught me how to defend them. He never said owt about my nose, though.”

Still in Blackpool, still running round Stanley Park, Brian London will be 82 on June 19.

RICHARD Dunn was pretty much confined to his chair when we chatted at his Scarborough home in 1990. “You might remember,” he said, “that I’ve been on my backside once or twice before.”

Ali alone put him there five times in five world title rounds in Munich in 1976, reputedly prompting the champ to beg the television crews to get the adverts on quickly. “I can’t hold this sucker up much longer,” he said.

Ali, who’d fought Jimmy Young for the world title just 24 days earlier, won when the referee called a commercial break.

Back in 1990, the 6ft 4in Dunn had spent five months in hospital after a scaffolding fall while working on the oil rigs, his recovery still painful.

He’s now 71, still in Scarborough, still met Ali – “a fabulous guy, always a gentleman to me and my wife” – on his UK tours. He regrets, however, that The Greatest was paraded around the world long after illness had overtaken him.

“It really, really annoys me,” he told The Times. “He had pride, he had dignity. They took it all away.”

FORMER Echo photographer Ian Wright, then working for the Sunday Times, was among the throng at the Gipsies’ Green stadium in South Shields when Ali visited.

“My expenses were £104.44p,” recalls Ian, Darlington lad but long in Las Vegas. Once a journalist….

The chap on Ali’s right is Newcastle painter and decorator Jimmy Walker, who masterminded the visit – but readers may wish to pause for a moment to identify the guy on the left, with his hand on the rail.

It was Saturday, July 16, 1977. Technology was old. Ian had personally to take his film to Kings Cross, where a motorcycle courier awaited to take him – “bat out of hell, me with no crash helmet” – to the Sunday Times.

The paper put him up at a Heathrow hotel; the following day he flew to Paris to photograph Rudolf Nureyev. “It was wonderful,” he remembers, “two of the world’s greatest dancers in the same weekend.”

The chap on the left is Alan Price of The Animals. If not the greatest, they were pretty good, an’ all.

Top and bottom

THE Weardale Gazette (may its tribe increase) reports hard times for our old friends at Wearhead United, perhaps the only Crook and District League football club to have persuaded the Red Arrows to essay a dipped-wing fly past to mark the club’s centenary. That was in 2007, and on time to the second.

They may also be the only Crook and District side to have recruited the Chief of the Defence Staff to open their new pavilion, to have published a 170-page book to mark the aforesaid centenary or to have played a crucial bottom-of-the-table match at the Stadium of Light in Sunderland.

Remember that one? May 7, 2001. Stanhope Town were seventh (of eight), Wearhead one below them. Since both grounds were out of bounds because of foot and mouth disease, and all three were by the Wear, Stanhope chairman Clem O’Donovan wrote to Bob Murray – his opposite number at Sunderland – suggesting that Sunderland might help. To some surprise, they agreed.

The following day’s column – “any closer to football’s grass roots and you’d strike coal” – was breathless.

“At the stadium where, 48 hours earlier, Sunderland had played Charlton Athletic for a possible place in Europe, Stanhope Town played Wearhead United to see who might avoid finishing bottom.”

So perhaps Wearhead’s slightly paradoxical plight – top of the dale, bottom of the second division – is familiar. Without a win in 22 games, they’ve scored just 20, let in 104 at the other end and lost three of the four points they did accrue all season for failing to fulfil a fixture.

It’s thus nicely coincidental that we should hear from Ralph Ord, perhaps United’s most successful manager of recent times, and that in August he’ll be home on holiday from Australia.

Ralph it was who, in 1991, inspired Wearhead to their first trophy in 20 years – “an achievement so epochal,” said the column at the time, “that it would be almost churlish to record that it was only for winning a quarter-final.”

Wanna job? Though hope – like the great river – springs eternal, Ralph fears he must decline.

Back then he was manager of Eastgate leisure centre. Subsequently he has held very high office at many of the world’s major sporting events, including the London Olympics, and is now a coffee farmer Down Under.

In a 24-hour period last week, they had 14 inches of rain. Ralph reckons he has one or two other things on his mind.

“I confess to still following Wearhead’s fortunes online and last time I was home I looked up there in the hope of catching a match, but I fear that the chances of my return to management are about the same as a Crook and District League club persuading the Red Arrows to perform a fly past in their honour.”