Walter McGowan​: Courageous boxer who became world champion but whose progress was undermined by his tendency to suffer cuts

Walter McGowan fought in a long forgotten and bloody decade when British boxers won, lost and progressed only after taking risks in fights that seem ridiculous by modern standards. Wee Walter, as the '60s hacks occasionally referred to him, turned professional at 18 after just two defeats in 124 fights as an amateur in Scotland. He was guided by his father Thomas, who had fought as a professional using the name of American legend Joe Gans; the original Gans crammed 176 bouts into an extraordinary career and was the first black world champion.

McGowan was 5ft 2in in his socks and weighed under eight stone for much of his career. In 1963 the British Boxing Board of Control dropped their age limit to allow him to win the British flyweight title; at 20 he was the youngest ever British champion at that time. The Board altered another of their regulations in 1966 when they presented him with his own Lonsdale belt, which British champions usually keep only after winning three British title fights. McGowan, you see, had no rivals at flyweight in Britain.

The following year McGowan agreed terms to fight in Rome for the European title at flyweight against the veteran Salvatore Burruni; McGowan had fought just 14 times. A hasty warm-up was arranged and McGowan returned to the ring at his citadel, the Paisley Ice Rink, to fight Finland's Risto Luukkonen, who was the European bantamweight champion. McGowan won, but lost to Burruni over 15 rounds in Rome only six weeks later in front of 15,000.

He was, so George Whiting wrote in the Evening Standard, a "pallid slip of a lad", but he returned to Scotland with £2,600, a damaged knuckle on his left hand and the knowledge that he would win a rematch. Burruni, meanwhile, had stitches in an inch-long slit in his left eyebrow, cuts above and beneath his right eye and a nick on the bridge of his nose. "I looked like the champion," said McGowan, who was still only 21.

He had also significantly been four pounds inside the flyweight limit, and that is an enormous disadvantage for slight men of less than eight stone. His promoter, Jack Solomons, decided rather bizarrely after the loss in Rome that McGowan's fighting future was up at bantamweight, a gain of 6lb; an extra weight division, super-flyweight, separates the two weights today.

The following year a pair of ancient dangermen stopped McGowan in back-to-back fights; both were crazy pieces of matching that would never be part of a modern fighter's rehabilitation. McGowan was 22 when Mexican Joe Medel and American Ronnie Jones dropped and stopped him and it looked like a long, long way back for Wee Walter in a sport that was ruthless at that time.

A controversial draw back in Rome for the European bantamweight title against Tommaso Galli in late 1965 was followed by one of those mad breaks that dominate boxing, which operates under the glorious maxim that you get what you negotiate and not what you deserve.

In June 1966 at Wembley Empire Pool, on the eve of the World Cup, McGowan was matched with Burruni for the Italian's world flyweight title. The show lost Solomons £12,000 but after 15 rounds McGowan was world champion. It was a masterclass from McGowan and Burruni, having his 91st fight, was, according to Whiting, left throwing wild punches like a "homicidal novice."

It was after he won the title that McGowan's career took a truly irrational path; in his first fight as flyweight world champion he won the British bantamweight title from Alan Rudkin, then fought behind closed doors at a men's only sporting club in London's Park Lane before accepting £10,000 to fight on 30 December 1966 in Thailand in a world title defence. It was a cruel and mindless sequence that would never happen now.

McGowan, fighting in front of Thailand's king and queen, dropped Chartchai Chionoi twice in round two, and was winning the fight before a four-inch gash on his nose ruled him out in the ninth. In their world-title rematch in 1967, this time at Wembley, McGowan was leading again before a cut over his left eye ended the fight in round seven. His luck never recovered; he lost to Rudkin in a rematch, won six more fights and then retired at just 28 in 1970 when a European title fight fell through. There was no endless reinvention for any of the four British world champions in the 1960s.

He went on to run the Walter McGowan Bar & Grill in Carluke, Lanarkshire and drifted along the outskirts of the boxing business. A pair of his signed gloves are on display at Peter Harrison's Phoenix gym in Glasgow, a sacred boxing retreat where McGowan spent time. Harrison still shows his young boxers McGowan's looping left hook, a tribute no record books will ever capture.

In 2002 McGowan was declared unfit to plead in an assault charge when dementia and drinking were competing to ruin his life. He died a neglected champion, a rare teenage sensation – and a man who would have dominated had he been fighting 50 years after his six brief months of world title glory.

Walter McGowan, boxer and publican: born Hamilton, Lanarkshire 13 October 1942; MBE; died Monklands, Lanarkshire 15 February 2016.