A mere drop-kick away from where Gareth Owen lives is a park that plays home to Maesteg Celtic RFC, a club whose forwards once stood toe to toe with Pontypool in their pomp, when Graham Price, Charlie Faulkner, Bobby Windsor and Terry Cobner were part of a pack that struck fear into opponents across Britain.
Ray Prosser’s Pontypool frequently crushed rival teams into submission.
But the eight Celtic forwards who faced Pooler in the Welsh Cup that December day in 1976 didn’t take a step back. The Llynfi Valley side were leading until two minutes from time when the full-back Robin Williams kicked a penalty from in front of the posts, allowing the visitors to escape with a 13-12 win that could not have been harder-earned. “The only difference between the teams was that we had all the luck,” reflected Cobner afterwards.
The display confirmed Celtic’s reputation for uncompromising forward play. Years later, inspired by No. 8 Ian Hembrow — any list of Welsh rugby’s hard men is incomplete without reference to him — they stood their ground against a fully loaded Neath at close to the peak of their powers.
The owner of the voice on the other end of the phone, though, living just yards from Celtic’s ground, made his name not as a forward but as a back, and a good one, too, good enough for former Wales coach Scott Johnson to once liken him to a peak-era Gavin Henson.
“Gareth reminds me so much of Gavin, physically as much as anything," said the then Ospreys rugby director when Gareth Owen was breaking through at the south-west Wales region.
"He's the olive kid, well-built and a great athlete. He's probably a bit more explosive than Gav.
"You can't put in what God left out and he was at the front of the queue when they handed out athletic gifts. He has an amazing turn of speed and physical presence."
Johnson went on to predict Wales would get a “very, very good-quality Test player in a few years’ time”.
Injuries stopped that from happening.
After a career-threatening bump with the Ospreys, Owen went on to play for Scarlets, Leicester and Newcastle Falcons before quietly retiring as a player on medical grounds in the summer, a back injury cutting short his time in the game.
He has wasted no time moving onto the next phase of his career, training as a butcher to work in the Black and White Pig company, the family business in Bridgend.
It’s all a bit far removed from the rugby pitch.
But like the old TV advertisement for Murphy’s stout, he’s not bitter.
In fact, he’s content, not least because the injury that forced him to cut short his playing days has eased.
“I’m good,” he says.
“Basically, I see it as a new chapter. Every player has to finish at some point and I’ve just ended things a bit early, that’s all.
“I couldn’t carry on as I was. I’d had a problem with my back for a long time and could not get to the bottom of it.
“Periodically, it would flare up, then it would behave, then it would flare up again after I’d returned to action.
“So I went to see a consultant last March and he told me I had a disc issue which wasn’t going to go away. He said: ‘If I’m honest, for your quality of life, I’d advise you to finish.’
“Based on his advice, my age and having a young family, I decided to call it a day.”
The decision couldn’t have been easy, though.
Since the age of eight, all Owen had ever wanted to do was play rugby. Like others who try to make it in sport, he put in hundreds of hours — thousands, perhaps — training, playing, attending trials and being part of squad meet-ups. When he was 14, he had a picture taken with Jerry Collins after a South Africa v New Zealand Test in Pretoria. Ever since he broke through with the Ospreys, he’d known he was one of the few who were fortunate enough to play sport for a career, being paid to do something they would have gladly done for free.
Now here was this serious-faced medical man telling him it was all over at the age of 32. How did it feel?
“Initially I was just relieved to find out what was causing the issues I was having,” says Owen.
“I was experiencing terrible sciatica pain and losing feeling in my right leg.
“The specialist identified the cause of the problem. Just knowing what it was, and knowing that reducing my load would ease the pain, came as relief.
“Then, I thought: ‘Ooof. Wait a minute. I’m out of contract from July. What am I going to do?’
“Luckily, I had something in place with my dad for around six or seven years, which we’d built up. He’d been running it while I’d been doing rugby.
“So I had something I could potentially go back into.”
Now he’s learning the butcher’s art.
He wouldn’t be human if, on a wet Monday morning as he started his working week, he didn’t occasionally allow his mind to wander back to the sunny afternoon at Twickenham in the spring of 2008, when he came on in the final minutes of the EDF Energy Cup final as a replacement for James Hook, with the Ospreys going on to beat Leicester 23-6 in front of a crowd of 65,000.
But then he’d snap out of such a reverie.
“I’m enjoying it,” he says of life as a butcher.
“Right now I’m at the training stage.
“Our company does a lot with restaurants, hotels, cafes — commercial-based stuff.
“We do have a shop that’s front of house but the majority of our trade would be commercial.
“I had a good rugby career that I got a lot out of. There were injuries along the way, but those are an occupational hazard and if we all had regrets we could spend our entire lives wondering what if we’d done this or what if we’d done that.
“You just have to roll with the punches and go with what comes our way.
“There’s great camaraderie in rugby, but, if I’m honest, lockdown gave me an insight into what it would be like to be apart from the squad environment, with all the isolation involved.
“I do miss playing — of course I do. That said, I don’t miss waking up every morning and struggling to get out of bed and making it downstairs.
“The back problem has eased massively since I finished. Every now and again it gets a bit sore but I’ve learned how to manage it. It’s not like in rugby where you need to be out there every day. I can do what it takes if there’s a particular day when I need to take it a bit easier.”
That introduction to Collins came in the South African capital in 2003. The then Hurricanes player was already on his way to super-stardom, but he posed for pictures with the starry-eyed Welsh schoolboy looking up at him and could not have been more accommodating.
Just over half-a-decade later Owen and Collins were team-mates at the Ospreys. .
“It’s shows that you never know what’s ahead” Owen says.
“I was 14 and on a tour out in South Africa. We went to watch a Test between the Springboks and the All Blacks and I had a photograph taken with Jerry. Six years later there I was, running out on the pitch alongside him.
“As a little boy, you look up to these people.
“Then I got to play alongside him and have beers with him after games.
“On the pitch he was this figure opponents were wary of.
“Off it, he was the most gentle, friendly man you’d ever meet, someone who’d do anything for anybody. There were no airs and graces. He was humble and down to earth — normal. He was some man.”
Turn back the clock to 2008, when Owen was playing for Wales U20s. In their Six Nations fixture against France that year, they fielded Leigh Halfpenny, Jonathan Davies, Dan Biggar, Rhys Webb and Justin Tipuric, while France had future stars Benjamin Fall, Mathieu Bastareaud, Wesley Fofana, Morgan Parra and Yoann Maestri in their ranks, but the man-of-the-match gong that day went to Owen, playing at inside centre.
”It was a really strong Wales squad, with a lot of the boys kicking on to big things,” says Owen.
“Sam Warburton was in the squad as well.
“You just knew he was going somewhere. He was committed and awesome over the ball.
“Where would he rank among the players I played alongside? It’s hard to say because he was so young back then.
“It’s the same with Justin Tipuric.
“But even when he was at Aberavon in his development days Justin still played in the opposition’s faces and did everything he could to win, whatever that took. He’s an extremely good footballer.
“I remember going to a trial and he was kicking goals for his team.
“I was like: ‘Jeez, who’s this guy?’
“So it’s almost impossible to pick one player out.
“But I can remember being really impressed with Marty Holah, who was a phenomenal athlete and player.”
Owen left Welsh rugby in 2017 after five seasons with the Scarlets.
There followed two years with Leicester Tigers and a couple of seasons with Newcastle Falcons.
“I didn’t expect the English Premiership to be as competitive as it was,” he says.
“ The only way to describe it is to say it’s like playing in Europe every week, with huge intensity.
“You have to try to play what’s in front of you and take it all in but you also have to recognise there will be tough times as well as good times.
“At the Ospreys I did my cruciate ligaments — anterior, posterior and lateral collateral all in one go — but I probably still enjoyed my stay with them the most.
“They were winning things and for a young kid it was a dream coming true. I was playing with players I’d been watching on TV just a short time before.”
Owen adds: “Rugby was a different game when I started out.
“Back in 2008 you had the likes of Gavin Henson and James Hook playing free-flowing, expansive rugby, but the sport changes and nowadays you have bigger, stronger players like Manu Tuilagi on the pitch. He can run around you, through you, step past you, whereas someone like James would try to dance past you and use deception.
“I’d like to think having such a serious injury early in my career gave me the perspective to appreciate everything that followed
“So while I’m not playing any more and while I had my career shortened a bit, I still have memories no-one can take away.”
Assuredly, it’s a good outlook to have.
Want the latest Welsh rugby news sent straight to you? Look no further.
