article: Thirty years ago, the boy from the Gellideg estate challenged Mexican Lupe Pintor for his WBC Bantamweight belt. Despite defying the odds to dominate the early stages of the fight, he was knocked out in the 12th round, never to regain consciousness again. In a typically hard-fought battle for life, he survived for another two months, but on 4 November 1980, Johnny Owen eventually succumbed to his terrible head injuries. Born to a large Merthyr family, Johnny soon learned to stick up for himself, and started his interest in boxing aged just eight. He was to remain in the amateur sport until he was 20, an unusually long time by modern standards; winning 106 of his 124 bouts. He fought for Wales 17 times, and was victorious on 15 occasions. Yet despite this impressive record, Merthyr boxing writer and professional referee, Winford Jones, says that Johnny's true talent didn't lie in the shorter format of the sport. "Johnny was a machine. His great skill wasn't his strength - though he never took a backwards step and could punch as hard as anyone of his weight - it was his stamina. "He could fight for hours, and would wear opponents down by outlasting them. You could see this talent far more in 12 and 15-round professional fights, than you could in the three rounds allowed in amateur boxing." His professional career lasted just four years, from 1976 to 1980, but in that time Johnny Owen crammed in 28 fights; winning 25, drawing one and losing two. Though in a sense it is possible to argue that he never lost fair and square. His first defeat came against Spain's Juan Francisco Rodriguez, in a fight for the European belt. In what's now widely regarded by experts to have been a travesty of a home-town decision, the judges awarded Rodriguez a fight which Owen had clearly bossed. His second, and final defeat came in the fatal clash with Pintor, a fight in which he at least held his own, and may have won, were it not for the head injuries which he'd sustained. But at one stage Owen's record read 22-0, winning his first fight against a former Welsh champion, George Sutton. In his sixth fight he again saw off Sutton to claim the Welsh title. By bout nine he had the British belt, beating Paddy Maguire, and in November 1978 he became the Commonwealth champion, stopping Italian-Australian Paul Ferreri. Owen wasted no time in avenging the controversial defeat to Rodriguez in the spring of 1979. Just a year later he convincingly bettered him in a re-match in Ebbw Vale, setting up his World title chance against Pintor. Winford Jones was lucky enough to referee some of those early fights. "In what I think must have been his fourth or fifth fight, I remember he was taking on an Irish lad, and I had to stop it in the fourth round because Johnny was murdering him. "It makes you think about what happened a few years later on to Johnny. "But he was fearless, you
summary: In the firmament of Welsh boxing legends, no star has burned so brightly, or for such a tragically short time, as the "Merthyr Matchstick", Johnny Owen.