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Rachel Trezise reads one boxing story with punch – and one without.

The Big If:
The Life and Death of Johnny Owen
Rick Broadbent


Macmillan
£16.99 Hardback
ISBN 9781405052986

Occupation Prizefighter:
The Freddie Welsh Story
Andrew Gallimore


Seren
£14.99 Hardback
ISBN 9781854113955

The Big If, as its subtitle spells out, is a book about the life and death of the Merthyr Matchstick, Johnny Owen, and the story of how two boxers who grew up miles apart came together one night for an apocalyptic fight that had seismic consequences for both them and their families. In September 1980, Owen, whilst trying to become the world bantamweight champion, was knocked out in the twelfth round by Mexican Lupe Pintor. It was the first time he’d been knocked to the floor and the first time he’d been knocked out. He spent forty-six days in a coma before he died. Rick Broadbent’s account revolves around this fatal match, comparing the lives of the opponents: Owen’s hard, but loving childhood in a south Wales valleys council house and Pintor’s teenage runaway years, spent selling ice on the tough streets of Mexico City.

   Most of the story is drawn from Broadbent’s extensive interviews with the Owen family, which makes for many kind and emotional recollections of the boxer’s early years. There are plenty of remarkable anecdotes: his sister having to sew lead into the lining of his shorts so that he could make the weight for a local bout, or the fact that he only decided to turn professional when his family was  threatened with an expensive lawsuit, and Broadbent, who is primarily a sports writer, manages to capture the essence of life in 80s Merthyr Tydfil, making this a fascinating story about a human struggle which transcends boxing and sport.

   The boxing sections are vivid and accessible and also, for the most part, told through the eyes of Dick Owen, Johnny’s father, to whom the book is dedicated. Astonishingly, it was Dick Owen who chose Lupe Pintor to unveil the Johnny Owen statue that stands in Merthyr today, giving the book an uplifting climax. The key message however, at least for a woman who has never watched a boxing match from beginning to end, excluding a couple of Rocky films, is that boxing, like gambling, is a game in which you need to know when to quit.

   This is certainly the case in Occupation Prizefighter by Andrew Gallimore. Frederick Hall Thomas, who left Pontypridd in 1904 for a new life in America and reinvented himself as ‘Freddie Welsh’, cuts a notable figure. Billing him as a pugilist, writer, vegetarian, philosopher, American, Welshman, and the inspiration behind F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the book takes him as its focal point and follows him through the decades and continents that saw him rise to the ranks of World Champion and fall back down into poverty again.

   The opening chapters of the book are by far the most enthralling, as Gallimore takes his readers on an adventure with young Freddie. After discovering a fondness for a fight and perfecting his moves on his younger brother, whom he paid a few shillings for the privilege, he was sent to an English public school where he fought off each and every one of his bullies. From the age of fourteen he’d try to find regular work in Wales and in Canada but would be unable to hold down a job due to his love of fighting. If he took a slight dislike to a fellow employee a scrap would quickly ensue, and his habit of getting the sack in this way pushed him to the edge of American and Canadian society, where he lived as a ‘hobo’, hitching, begging, borrowing and brawling in order to survive day by day. This part of the book has something of the thriller about it: it’s a furious recollection of, as Gallimore puts it, ‘a rebel by birth and nature’. As soon as Freddie Hall Thomas becomes Freddie Welsh, however, the book loses some of that warmth. Between turning professional and winning and then losing the World Championship – some 200 pages – boxing match follows boxing match, all told in fairly colourless language which distances the reader from the fighter and the fighter from the man. It quickly becomes difficult to sympathise with the subject, partly because he never loses a match, and is never expected to, and partly because the majority of the research for this book is drawn from boxing reports of the time. It is a boxing biography that lacks the liveliness of Broadbent’s story and may only interest sports enthusiasts.

   To make matters a little worse, the Great Gatsby thread seems to be tacked onto the last chapter like a carrot dangled for anyone more interested in literature than in boxing. It is a buzz to discover that in the first draft of The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby’s car hits a woman called Myrtle Wislon, only a few days after Freddie Welsh drove into a woman called Myrtle Wislon, as it is to discover that Freddie Welsh was an ancestor of Pontypridd writer Alun Richards. Unfortunately, these highlights were not powerful enough to quell my earlier disappointments, and not enough to save Freddie Welsh from his inauspicious end. Unable to leave the limelight, Welsh returned time and again to the ring to fight younger, healthier men, and always lost. He lived in a cheap New York hotel room, pawned his champion belt for $100, and died of a heart attack induced by a street brawl. Though his life was sometimes extraordinary, it ended without a hint of magnificence, much like this book about him.