To those who had never seen Johnny Owen perform, the impossibly thin and impossibly pale man who made his way to the ring at the Los Angeles Olympic Auditorium didn’t appear to pose much of a threat. Given that his opponent was Lupe Pintor, the stockier and more forceful bantamweight champion of the world, the Welshman seemed especially outmatched. But Painter vs. Owen defied expectations. Indeed, few could have predicted the young Welshman’s astonishing toughness; Fewer still could have foreseen the dire consequences of such harshness.
The brave Johnny Owen, after giving Pintor one of his toughest battles, was knocked out in the twelfth round. He went into a coma and about six weeks later, he died. He was only 24 years old.
Hailing from Merthyr Tydfil in Wales, Owen was nicknamed “The Merthyr Matchstick” due to his slim frame. After a stellar amateur career, he had captured the Welsh belt, followed by the British, Commonwealth and European titles. He had lost just once in 27 professional fights, the victim of an atrocious local decision against Juan Francisco Rodríguez in Almería. After that fight, Spanish authorities seized Matchstick’s bag, meaning he went home literally empty-handed. This fight, against the disadvantages inherent in a modest man both in background and behavior, was to mark his career. But the bottom line was that no one should have doubted that he had earned the chance to challenge Pintor for a world title.
But Lupe Pintor hadn’t come the easy way either. Hardened by a difficult childhood in Mexico City, he had turned to boxing as a means of warding off the older boys who bullied him. He ran away from an abusive father, taking to the streets and fighting, both licensed and unlicensed, as he sought to escape poverty. Turning pro while still a teenager, he rose through the ranks before securing a title challenge against the legendary Carlos Zárate in June 1979. Pintor overcame a controversial split decision, but the method of victory was irrelevant: he was now a world champion.
Fast forward fifteen months and Pintor vs. Owen was the main event for an overflow crowd and while the title holder may have been from Mexico, the city’s dominant Hispanic contingent treated him like he was one of their own. Instead, Johnny Owen and his crew, including his father Dick’s, were booed and pelted with trash from the stands as they entered the venue.
But in the early rounds, the skinny Welshman surprised the crowd by taking the fight to the heavy-handed Painter, aggressively chasing him down and outboxing him. Given his height and reach advantages, most expected him to try to outbox the Mexican, but Owen started a fast-paced fight. In the fifth, the valiant challenger cut his opponent across both eyes, though he himself suffered a nasty cut to his lip, causing him to swallow a significant amount of his own blood.
Pintor returned in the sixth, throwing hooks and hooks with malicious intent, and while the indomitable Owen kept up his own high output, none of his punches carried the damaging power of the Mexican. The champion scored with strong right hands in the early part of the seventh round, prompting cheering chants and firecrackers from the crowd, but an undaunted Owen continued to advance and throw leather. And in the eighth it was more of the same, a head-to-head war, with Pintor hitting the most revealing shots, but Owen refusing to back down.
Then, in the ninth, the beginning of the end. Seemingly leading the scorecards at this point, Owen was now clearly slowing down and a vicious right hand put him on the canvas late in the round, the first knockdown of his pro career. His pride made him get up immediately, instead of taking the count and giving himself time to recover.
Having been saved by the bell, Owen kept fighting, insisting to the father who trained him that he couldn’t quit now that he was so close to winning a world title. Painter proceeded to stalk the challenger, throwing hard right hands and aiming for his poorly marked face. Owen was knocked down twice more in the twelfth, first with a straight right and then with a short right hook. That punch was the last action of the fight and may well be one of the most disturbing punches ever filmed. Looking at him now, Owen falls apart, almost in slow motion, before he hits the mat. A contemporary writer claimed that the Welshman fell like “a puppet whose strings had been cut”.
Both fighters were picked up after the final bell. The champion climbed on the shoulders of his team and paraded around the ring. The challenger was eventually put on a stretcher, which was not available, and was then carried out of the auditorium. As Owen’s entourage frantically ran through enemy territory, some members of the frenzied crowd threw debris. Several members of Owen’s crew had their pockets picked and opportunistic thieves stole equipment and supplies from around the corner, making a troubling scene even uglier.
Owen had two brain operations and spent a month and a half on life support before he died on November 4, after contracting pneumonia in hospital. It was later discovered that he had an abnormally fragile skull, a condition that could only have exacerbated Painter’s destructive blows. His funeral drew thousands of mourners, many of whom knew him, others who had only seen his brilliance from afar. Boxing reporters later focused on Owen’s shy nature as much as his pugilistic talent. For Hugh McIlvanney, it was a poignant irony that this “inaudible and almost invisible [man] … found himself articulated in such dangerous language.”
Painter was left distraught over the outcome of the fight, only for the Owen family to encourage him to continue boxing. After all, they said, he could always have been the other way around. The Mexican champion retained the title from him a month after his opponent’s death and competed until 1995.
In 2002 a statue of Johnny Owen was erected in Merthyr Tydfil. Lupe Pintor inaugurated it. —Rob Lowney
