On Tuesday night I was down in Birmingham at the Holiday Inn hotel for an evening with the legendary boxer Sugar Ray Leonard.

Unfortunately it wasn't a social evening I was actually working as , believe it or not , the official photographer for the event!

I have set up a little business for my Daughter which involves providing all the camera equipment and printers for sportsman's dinners involving lots of different celebrities.

The "star" on the evening will pose for photo's with people and then we can print out the picture straight away , frame it and the person can take it away with them there and then.

We have done a couple now but this one was by far the biggest one we had done and involved arguably the biggest celebrity of the ones so far as well.

When we arrived we had no idea whether Ray would even want to pose for photographs as it is not in his contract to do so and really depends on whether he was in the mood or not!

As we were setting up one of the organisers came over and said that Sugar Ray Leonard had heard about me and wanted to meet me!

Well this was as good an opportunity as any I thought to get him to pose for some photos so off we went to meet him in the VIP section of the hotel with camera in hand!

As soon as I walked into the room Ray looked up and shouted "Hey it's the Power"! and walked over to me to shake my hand.

Now as you know I love Boxing and Sugar Ray Leonard is one of the all time greats so it was a bit of an honour that he knew me and was rushing over to meet me.

"I wanna see this Power Tattoo on your arm" he said ,grabbing hold of my wrist to examine it closely.

Then he asked me could he have a picture done with me holding my arm out so he could get the tattoo in shot!

You will be able to see some of the pics from the night in the My Photo's section shortly.

We chatted for a while about our respective sports and careers and he expressed his admiration that I had managed to stay at the top for so long and that the concept of winning 12 World Championships at something in the USA is unheard of!

We chatted about his fantastic fights with "Marvellous" Marvin Hagler and Thomas "The Hitman" Hearns and it made me realise even more that I was in the company of a true sporting legend.

The evening went brilliantly after that with Ray agreeing to come out and pose for photographs for 20 minutes after he had finished speaking .

In fact he ended up spending over an hour with us and made sure every single person got a picture with him.

I cannot thank him enough for doing this as he was also feeling slightly under weather which must have made it difficult for him to be surrounded by 500 people all wanting a picture with him!

It was a great night and I can't wait till the next one now as it was really good fun .

See ya later

Phil