It was the week the greatest eclipsed the grandest, boxing legend Muhammad Ali pulling bigger crowds than the Queen in my hometown.
She visited South Shields on the mouth of the River Tyne in July 1977 as part of her Silver Jubilee celebrations.
He flew into a British coal mining and shipbuilding area for a marriage blessing in our mosque, game of darts at the seaside, much clowning about and an open top bus ride.
Sometimes we Sandancers, as sons and daughters from a place with gorgeous golden beaches are known, pinch ourselves that it really happened.
It did and four days of glorious mayhem in North East England are to be finally immortalised in a new film, A God Amongst Men.
Her Maj’s trip is largely forgotten yet there’s genuine pride the world’s then most famous man came to us.
Shields had seen nothing like it since the Romans pitched up in AD 160 and built Arbeia, a fort on the Lawe Top.
Overwhelmed by the ecstatic reception and knowing how to flatter, the three times heavyweight champion of the world cooed: “To think I have so many friends in South Shields. I am going to tell them in America!”
British actor Nicholas Pinnock, whose credits include a young Nelson Mandela and Leon in Top Boy, is to play the Louisville Lip.
And former Doctor Who Christopher Ecclestone is to be painter and decorator Johnny Walker, the obsessive from Whitburn who made possible the impossible by flying to the US where he persuaded Ali to help raise money for a Tyneside boxing club.
The visit at the peak of Ali’s fame is vivid in the memories of those who witnessed a remarkable occasion.
Outside the Al-Axhar Mosque where Ali’s marriage to wife Veronica was blessed by an iman a crowd of 7,000 blocked the road.
Plumber Steven Millwater, 57, was a pupil at the time in the town’s Brinkburn Comprehensive when he rode into the blessing.
“We’d been fishing on the Mill Dam and were cycling home on our bikes through the Laygate area which back then had lots of disused buildings and land,” he recalls.
“We were just going along, minding our own business, and turn this corner where we see a lot of people outside the mosque.
“Mine was a purple Chopper with those high handlebars and we get off our bikes to see what’s happening and all of a sudden the most famous man in the world comes out with his wife.
“We were awe struck, it was unreal, completely surreal that he was in our town.
“We didn’t catch anything on the Mill Dam but bumping into the most famous man in the world was some consolation.
“I must be the only person in Shields from then who doesn’t claim that Ali looked me in the eye or shook my hand!
“My mam and dad used to drink with a man who used to be a Desert Rat, a prisoner of the Italians during the war.
“He was a proper Tory and had a bakery and offered a £1 bet to my mam that more people turned up for the Queen than for Ali.
“He’d have lost because Ali won, won easily. What a day.”
Millwater laughs at a friend’s memento of the visit meeting a sticky end.
“My mate was there when Ali on the bus was licking this great big lollipop with ‘I’m the Greatest’ on it,” recites Millwater.
“He chucked it into the crowd and the mate picked it up.
“All licked and that, he didn’t want to eat it.
“So he took it home and put the thing in his mam’s fridge.
“These green things started growing out of it and she chucked the lollipop out.
“He was right cheesed off. There was no eBay in 1977. That happens today and he could’ve sold it for a sweet fortune.”
The superstar also visited Pendower Hall special school in Newcastle and the Grainger Park Boys club, sparring with local children and former professionals.
Ali told an audience at a banquet in Newcastle’s Mayfair Ballroom the trip’s organising committee had given 14 return air tickets.
“When I’m in a big fight, I accept air tickets and accommodation because the promoters are making a lot of money,” he explained to the audience.
“But this is for charity, so I can’t accept all this. I am giving back the money for the tickets, and that is around £7,000. I just want to do all I can for your youngsters.”
The sensational visit left indelible memories.
Twins Paul and Steve Dean, now both 64, had not long left school to train as quantity surveyors with Gardiner & Theobald.
The pair are now Labour councillors on South Tyneside.
“It was amazing to see the crowds lining the streets of South Shields,” recalls Paul Dean who worked on the Byker Grove estate over the Tyne in Newcastle.
“Ali’s visit was undoubtedly one of the most memorable moments in the town’s history.
“The Queen enjoyed a decent turnout but Ali had the royal pulling power of a superhero.
“We went down Gypsies Green where there was a boxing tournament.
“He got into the ring where the showman in him pretended to be frightened of the local boxers.
“One of the seconds was a Shields gangster, a nasty piece of work, but he wisely didn’t give Ali any trouble.
“The open top bus tour was like the Great North Run is now with people lining the route, clapping and shouting.
“I sometimes pinch myself that he really came.
“Ali inspired not only because of his exploits in the ring, where he fought during the golden age of heavyweights in the 1970s, becoming the first three-time heavyweight world champion.
“He was also man of principal, refusing to fight in the Vietnam War. Even the Reverend Martin Luther King Junior praised Ali’s decision to become a conscientious objector.”
Steve Dean in that era worked in all the dry docks on the Wear when Sunderland was the foremost shipbuilding centre in the world. Until Margaret Thatcher sold them down the river and shut the lot. “I remember watching the interviews with Michael Parkinson which only increased my admiration for Ali,” Steve Dean told me.
“But I never thought that I would ever meet the world’s most famous sportsman so you could understand how excited I was to meet Mohammed Ali in person in 1977.
“Ali passed in his open top bus at the top of our street and along with my twin brother Paul we decided we had to go to South Shields to Gypsies Green where Ali was going to an event with a local boxing club.
“I still can’t believe we were able to get so close to our hero to actually shake hands with the world’s most famous sportsman.”
Muhammad Ali and South Shields may never rival the Rumble in the Jungle with George Foreman but it’s still a big story deserving a wider audience.
