He is expounding (again) for one and all in his compact restaurant on the peerless quality of contraband American beef, which raises a few eyebrows amongst the Australians in our group, not to mention the Canadians and the Japanese as well. He pours liberally from his bottles of house red and critiques his own work.

'There is nothing on the menu that is ordinary, Madam,' he says to a nearby table. 'Everything on the menu is great or it wouldn't be on the menu. But what's really special tonight is the ...'

We have little say in the evening. He tells us when to open our champagne and when to eat our main course. Sure he's a control freak, but the food is delicious and so is the wine. It really is a special night and after we eat dinner we move to the outside terrace to listen to Greg on guitar strumming his way through a most eclectic collection that includes everything from Pink Floyd to Jose Feliciano's version of The Doors' Light My Fire.

My brother and I even hop on to the stage for a duet of The Weight by The Band before Blair hands me something that changes this piece I'm writing from a restaurant review to a sports column. It's a large book called Legends of the Field: The Classic Sports Photography of Ozzie Sweet.

Inside the pages of his father's book is the tapestry of my adolescent life. It's not only striking, it's emotional as well. These are the players I worshipped as a kid, the ones whose feats instilled an illogical passion for sports that runs unchecked still in these middle aged bones.

Bobby Hull, Jimmy Brown, Willie Mays, all of them captured by Blair's father, one of the top American sports photographers of the 20th century. I am so enraptured that Honey could be chewing on my ear and I wouldn't notice.

There are also pictures of Ingrid Bergman and James Mason from Newsweek that Ozzie snapped. Two shots share the top of one page and the captions next to them say it all: Yogi Berra, genius. Albert Einstein, genius.

'I remember my dad telling me that when he showed up to shoot Einstein, he was shocked,' said Blair. 'Here was one of the most brilliant men in the world and his shoelaces were untied, his sweater was moth-eaten and ragged and his hair was a total mess. His people had to come in and tidy him up.'

But it was shooting the top athletes of the day, mostly for Sport magazine, that really made a name for Ozzie. If Sweet was intrinsically linked with any star it had to be Mickey Mantle, the New York Yankee golden boy whose name still elicits tears amongst legions of baby-boomers. Sweet even published a 230-page book of Mantle pictures.

'Mantle was the last of the superstars who didn't have PR people handling requests for photos and interviews,' said Blair. 'He was very accommodating and he and dad would often go out for dinner and hang out. Same with Jack Nicklaus. It was a different time.'

The elder Sweet once befriended an up-and-coming boxer named Rocky Marciano. He was taken immediately by 'The Rock' and despite not having a magazine to commission his photos, Marciano gave Sweet total access, even letting him stay at his house for a week. A year later, Marciano knocked out Jersey Joe Walcott to become heavyweight champion of the world. Needless to say, the pictures were now in demand.

The pictures in the book are stories more than images, vignettes of a sporting era long gone. It was a seemingly simple time when sports tried to seal itself hermetically from the rest of the world.

And yet no matter how hard sports tried, reality always has a way of intruding.

Mantle had a serious drinking problem and died a particularly unglamorous, and premature, death from liver cancer.

Bobby Hull and Jimmy Brown were both charged with domestic abuse and battery.

But there they all are: sublime in their prime. Captured the way we want to remember them, the Ozzie Sweet way.

At 85 years of age, he's still working. 'My father says the day he stops taking pictures is the day he dies,' said Blair.

It's a sentiment he echoes himself as he faces his own pending problems. 'Were still here,' says Blair, 'the show must go on.' And so it does as Gary launches into a verse from REM's Man on the Moon. Another round of cold beer arrives and Honey nudges me, again, in a most provocative way.