A QUARTER of a century has passed since Johnny Owen, the Bionic Bantam, was ferried to a hospital in Hope Street and his grieving father wandered in a daze among the thieves and drug dealers of downtown Los Angeles. Eventually he was picked up by a policeman, who told him how fortunate he was. “No white man usually gets out of here alive,” he said. The boxing trainer knew he had been anything but lucky.

Behind the nets of the weather-beaten council house in Merthyr Tydfil and behind the iron gate, daubed with graffiti, in Mexico City, the wounds of September 1980 will never heal. Twenty-five years ago this week, Owen, 24, was spending the first of six weeks in a coma after his ill-fated shot at the WBC bantamweight title and Lupe Pintor, the teak-tough Mexican champion, was paying his first visit to the hospital where he lay. “There was an alcove in the foyer with a crucifix on the wall, ” Ken Bryant, Owen’s cornerman, said. “Pintor was just in the corner, praying. I thought that was great.”

Owen’s death captured the sympathy of those way beyond Merthyr Tydfil and the valleys. His had been an extraordinary life: a skeletal figure who became the British, European and Commonwealth champion despite having an abnormally thin skull. The night before he boxed Pintor, Owen’s brother, Vivian, had a dream in which the entire family, apart from Johnny, was dressed in mourning suits. Owen himself had penned a portentous postscript to the last entry in his little green diary. “Hope everything comes right on the night,” it read. “It’s a big if.”

What many of those who mourned Owen have never realised is that Pintor boxed again only a month after his opponent died. It has been suggested that Pintor contemplated quitting, but he admitted that was never the case. That may sound insensitive or even ignorant, but Pintor was a boxer and his conscience was clear.

“When he died, it was like I lost a close friend,” he said at the home that betrays few trappings of his former trade, his WBC belt hidden behind a row of miniature cars in a cocktail cabinet. “It was very difficult, but I knew I had to get over it and just threw myself back into the gym.

“I never felt that I was at fault. The beautiful thing is Johnny was fighting for prestige for his family, prestige for his country and prestige for himself. Despite what happened, he got those things. At the end of the day, we were both fighting for a beautiful life. Fighting for the right to be remembered.”

Pintor had been a heavy ringside favourite. He had sent the great Carlos Zárate into retirement the previous year. After expenses, Owen was to receive only £6,974.42 for his challenge and few in the United States gave him a prayer.

The Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles was a sea of partisan bile. Owen was pushed and spat at as he made his way to the ring. A friendly American told Owen’s father, Dick, to “piss off out of here quick” if his son won the title. But Owen produced an heroic performance, bloodying Pintor’s brow and threatening a shock with his hyperactive attrition.

But then, in the ninth round, Pintor’s greater weight of punch put Owen down. He soldiered on but fell again in the twelfth. Dredging the core of his inner reservoir, he rose for a last time but crumpled in a heap two punches later. In the aftermath, the Mexican crowd hurled cups of urine at the stretcher. Mickey Duff, the promoter, and Bryant had their pockets picked.

The Owens tried to rebuild their lives without Johnny, but he was pure spirit and it was hard. Marty Denkin, the referee, who went on to star in the Rocky films, said: “When he got knocked down, I asked if he was all right and he said, ‘Yes, sir.’ Imagine that. ‘Yes sir.’ He was the politest fighter I ever met.”

Pintor’s life after Owen encompassed the murder of his trainer, a motorcycle crash that almost killed him, divorce, remarriage and his reincarnation as a trainer. He has told Dick Owen that he should not feel guilty for failing to pull his son out of the bout. “We were both out there chasing life,” he said. “It was something Johnny wanted to do. At the level Johnny and I were fighting, if you got knocked down that made you more determined to come back for more.”

Owen now accepts that he could not have stopped Johnny and has gained some solace from realising that Pintor is a decent family man who has never forgotten that night. “It’s as painful now as it ever was,” Owen said. “But maybe it’s better to depart reaching for the stars than to live a hundred years and be forever embittered and disappointed.”