Boxing: Owen's memory gives Merthyr hope in fight against modern evils

Statue of Welsh fighter who died after world title bout 22 years ago revives poignant memories

A woman now in mid-life, she remembered the day Merthyr Tydfil buried Johnny Owen. She remembered rain, the steady, drenching valley rain falling on the thousands who trudged through the town and up to Owen's last resting place. "Seems like only yesterday," she said, the swiftness of time with her as it is with all of us, relentless and unnerving. "It was so sad, poor boy."

Witheringly, many fighters have died from injuries received in the ring since Owen slipped into a coma 22 years ago when challenging Lupe Pintor for the World Boxing Council bantamweight championship in Los Angeles but the Merthyr man's passing seven weeks later remains especially poignant. Painfully shy, Owen found scope for self-expression only in the most perilous of sporting endeavours. As my friend Hugh McIlvanney so memorably wrote: "It is his tragedy that he found himself articulate in such a dangerous language."

It rained on Saturday, endlessly, the low clouds breaking on the surrounding hillsides, bringing a typical late year's day to the Merthyr Tydfil Valley, a place more mysterious than its younger inhabitants imagine. The rain fell on a brolly-up celebration, the unveiling of a statue to commemorate Owen's boxing career, his brutally foreshortened life.

As a Welsh flag fell from bronze shoulders to reveal a likeness that does great credit to the sculptor David Done, there was a realisation of Merthyr's unique status in boxing. Erected in a shopping precinct, Owen's statue stands close to that of the late world featherweight champion Howard Winstone and not far from that of another national hero, Eddie Thomas, whose name is synonymous with Merthyr boxing.

A booklet first published by Merthyr Tydfil libraries in 1997 lists more than 100 fighters born in the Merthyr Valley, including the remarkable world flyweight champion Jimmy Wilde.

In 1900, boxing was condemned from a tabernacle pulpit, as "a craze... that has swept over South Wales like a fatal epidemic. It has reached the little school children, who are heard on the streets discussing the merits and demerits of certain fighters."

On Saturday, during a chapel service that preceded the the ceremony of unveiling, the Reverend David Protheroe held up Owen as a hero and an example to a generation at risk from alcoholism and drugs. The predictable punch in his forthright sermon was that Merthyr needed the disciplines of the ring, the dedication and drive that gave Owen heroic status to counter the scourges of modern culture.

There in the front row, alongside Owen's mother, father and other family members sat Lupe Pintor, the Mexican whose wicked punches had consigned their son, their brother to oblivion. I was looking at Pintor and thinking here is a man who completely represents the extraordinary comradeship that is central to boxing's existence. Pintor had taken the same risks as his stricken opponent, lived with them as Owen did, as every fighter does. He had not meant to inflict the grievous damage that caused so much heartache and led to his presence in this strange place so many long years afterwards. "It was an awful time," he had told Owen's father, Dick, who recently visited him at his home in Mexico City. "I prayed many times that Johnny Owen would recover. I desperately wanted him to live, to have the rest of his life."

When the contest was made, three factors converged to create in some of us a deep sense of foreboding. First, Pintor himself, a hard, uncomplicated champion. Then there was the fight's location, the Olympic arena in Los Angeles, a cockpit seething with hostile Hispanic support; finally, the fear that Owen, skilful as he was, simply did not possess the firepower to discourage Pintor in a long, punishing contest.

In conversations that followed Saturday's ceremony, people looked back on the fact of Owen's parity in assessment before he was inexorably worn down by the debilitating effects of Pintor's punching. "He was level at halfway, may even have been in front," somebody said. Yes, but it was never going to be enough. And Owen had carried to the ring a fatal weakness, one that would absolve Pintor of all self-searching conscience. A post-mortem revealed that Owen had a thin skull that would have led to his suspension from boxing had he been subject to medical requirements put in place after Michael Watson was left with a serious impairment of his senses after a contest against Chris Eubank in 1991, although such measures would have taken from Owen his reason for living.

Walking down through the old town to the Labour Club where many gathered after the ceremony I could not help but think of Eddie Thomas's remark that Merthyr children came so angrily into the world, many to endure conditions of indescribable squalor, with a life expectancy of less than five years, that their fists were clenched in the womb. All lost in history, the valley collieries a distant memory; the great foundries of Dowlais and Cyfartha laid to waste; the ironmasters and coal owners long in their graves.

Owen, Winstone and Thomas inherited a legacy of fighting men, none more astonishing than Cuthbert Taylor, who represented Great Britain at the 1928 Olympic Games. As a professional, Taylor had more than 300 bouts and fought four world champions but was denied a British title fight by the colour bar that existed until 1948.

I do not know whether anyone brought this up with Pintor, set out for him the startling facts of Merthyr's boxing history, but you sensed his awareness of being in one of the great fight towns. "I have a good feeling about being here," he said. "I know nobody holds me responsible for what happened. I am with people I understand and who seem to understand me."

A curious thing is that Johnny Owen never undertook a professional contest in the town where he was born. But it was to Merthyr that they brought his body, Merthyr where he rests. The likeness looks down and young people look up. We hope.