There are many photographs of revered people hanging on the walls of my local pub.
Photos of trade union leaders, politicians, Spanish Civil War veterans, footballers and all-round heroes.
But there is one in particular, to the right of the door in Liverpool’s Casa, that draws the most attention and wins the most admirers.
It’s of Muhammad Ali training in a London park, before his second fight with Henry Cooper, as a handful of Everton football fans who are in town for the 1966 FA Cup final, stare in awe at the world champ.
I’m sure there are images of those same awestruck expressions hanging in pubs and clubs, or sitting on mantelpieces, in many other British cities, reminders of the day that Ali turned up to cast his spell.
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They’ll be there in Tyneside after he made an open-top bus tour in 1977, raising cash for local boxing clubs and a mosque.
In Coventry from the time in 1983, when he also took an open-top tour of the city, before visiting ex-boxer Jack Bodell’s fish and chip shop.
Or in Glasgow in 1993, when there were manic scenes inside and outside a city centre bookshop.
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In 1999 he brought Brixton to a standstill when crowds packed the London streets to see him campaigning to erase Third World debt.
Twenty five years earlier he’d addressed pupils at a Brixton comprehensive school, after the governor, equality campaigner Paul Stephenson, accosted him in a London hotel on his was back from beating George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle, and begged him to visit.
“How are you going to pay me?” he asked, only to be told by Stephenson that he didn’t have a dime.
Ali replied: “Man, you have got more nerve than Frazier.”
The next day he was showing the Brixton schoolkids how to do the Ali Shuffle.
There’s been a love affair between the British people and Ali which dates back half-a-century, almost to the week.
Not that it was love at first sight. Many were put off by the brash arrogance of young Cassius Clay after he called national treasure Henry Cooper a “bum” then beat him controversially in 1963.
But when he returned to beat Cooper in May 1966, as world champion, the man who was now called Muhammad Ali put on a charm offensive before the TV cameras and we were smitten.
As his trainer Angelo Dundee observed: “When we first went to London you could have shot the a kid from a cannon and no one would have known him.
Three years later, when we went back, we could not walk the streets without being mobbed, there were never less than 500 people waiting outside the hotel.
And he loved being with the British public.”
This was the 1960s when Britain was throwing off the shackles of black-and-white post-war austerity.
The world was bursting into colour, becoming bolder and brasher, and no-one was bolder, brasher or more colourful than Ali.
It was a time when Harold Wilson had usurped the Old Etonian Tory clique and claimed Downing Street for the people.
When the plum-voiced Establishment was being overthrown by working-class accents in music, film, art and theatre.
And here was a beautiful man from a dirt poor, segregated background who had shaken off his slave name, refused to fight in an imperialist war and refused to dance to the Establishment’s tune.
He was the ultimate rebel of that rebellious decade and the ordinary people of Britain clutched him to their hearts.
Especially when America took away his title, labelled him a traitor and ostracised him for refusing to fight in Vietnam.
He actually felt one of us. Like The Beatles, he looked great, had a swagger, a charm, and most of all a rapier wit.
His subversive, sardonic sense of humour chimed with ours, just as satire was making its mark on TV with shows like That Was The Week That Was.
Davis Miller, an American biographer and friend of Ali, said: “His humour was cheeky. To be more vulgar, he took the p**s out of people.
"Americans don’t understand that concept. He loves the UK. And he was far better understood by the Brits than he was by the Americans.”
Crucially, we knew that the love was reciprocated. Ali fought more fights outside America in Britain than in any other country. He was a constant fixture in our cultural lives.
Half the nation would wake up in the 60s and 70s and switch their radios on praying to hear that he had won a fight in a faraway land during the night.
And he seemed to always be on our TV screens, whether being interviewed by Michael Parkinson, doing a live link from America to pick up another award on the BBC Sports Personality Of The Year, or on ITV’s This Is Your Life, when he never failed to entertain.
On that 1978 show, when his family and Joe Frazier turned up to pay tribute, Eamonn Andrews told him Ali he was bringing on the policeman who he had famously reported his stolen bike to when he was eight.
Quick as a flash he came back with: “Don’t tell me you finally found my bike.”
Parkinson spoke for us all in his final interview with Ali, when his health was visibly in decline.
He told him that the British people have “never felt about another boxer the way they felt about you.”
Those feelings grew immensely after he was stripped of his titles and denied a livelihood, after refusing to fight in Vietnam.
Overnight he became the one thing that Brits can’t help falling for: an underdog.
The Yanks may have turned their back on him, but we didn’t. He was still, throughout his exclusion from the ring, Our Champ. If they didn’t want him, we did.
He sensed it, and sought shelter here in a country that spoke his language, but didn’t judge him or hound him for his beliefs.
we had our own racial problems they were nothing in comparison to what was happening in America where black people were denied basic human rights.
He deeply appreciated how much Britain supported him during that time and never forgot.
One of the main reasons I ended up spending a day at his Michigan ranch, interviewing him for The Mirror, in 2001, was because I was a British journalist.
As bizarre a concept as it may seem, Ali actually liked and trusted us.
“You English journalists are not afraid to tell the truth” he told me.
Before admitting his real reason for wanting to do pieces with us: “You let all my friends in my second home know how great I’m doing. So tell them I’ll be over soon.
"I plan on celebrating my 60th birthday by winning my title back in London. So tell them all to be there. And we’ll have one big party.”
He last came to Britain in 2012, helping to carry the Olympic flag at the opening ceremony of the London Games despite his frail condition.
And had planned to come here over the summer to visit an exhibition on his life, called I Am the Greatest, at the O2 centre in London.
Sadly he never made it. But the memories still remain. Many of them.
And the tens of millions of us on this side of the Atlantic, who were touched by his magic, will never forget the kid from Kentucky who we adopted as one of our own.
