Glen’s days with Ravens a match made in heaven
HAVING made his name as a black sportsman in 1980s Britain, the temptation when meeting Glen Webbe is to assume that his recollections will be underpinned by a struggle for acceptance, and prominence, in a far less racially enlightened era.
They are not. Webbe encountered bigotry, of course he did. A spectator at Maesteg once threw a banana at him while he was playing there for Bridgend. Webbe picked it up, peeled it, took a bite and then chucked it back.
Now 56 and a director of a thriving kitchen design business in Cardiff, Webbe says he is someone who has always chosen to defuse racism with humour.
Save for the odd incident like that at the Old Parish, the former Bridgend and Wales wing does not view prejudice about the colour of his skin as having defined his rugby career, even though many suspected it as the reason the WRU took so long to hand him his Test debut in June 1986.
What did define his career, as well as the 10 Wales caps, the searing pace and the prolific tryscoring, was the character the sport helped him become, the respect he earned from his peers, and the friends he made for life.
And then there are the stories...
In 1988 Webbe was part of the Wales squad that beat England 11-3 at Twickenham. The match was famous not just for the result but for the pranks and japes that went on around it.
One of them, Webbe revealed, ended with him being carpeted by WRU officials on the return to Cardiff.
“We’d stopped in Windsor on the way to the game and gone around this shop,” he recalled.
“I’d managed to get hold of one of the hands off a mannequin in the window and before the game I was going up to people and using it to shake hands. When they grabbed the hand I’d release it and you can imagine the reaction it got.
“Then it came to the team photograph. I’m in the back line, arms folded with one black hand and one white one!”
Then WRU secretary Ray Williams was not amused when the pictures returned from the developers. He hauled Webbe into his office but got little more than a resigned shrug of the shoulders.
The Twickenham jaunt had truly been one to remember.
Thirty years on, Webbe, quite frankly, looks fit enough to still be playing.
He greets me in the car park of his business, The Kitchen Bureau, and is lean and muscular and later explains that he leads fitness classes that focus on boxing exercises as a sideline.
Success appears to have found the married father of two daughters – university student Lily, 20 and Marcy, 15 – in business as it did in rugby, but the journey has been similarly circuitous.
Webbe was facing up to losing everything when the parent company of his old kitchen company went bust.
Then late last year he secured investment from a former customer which enabled him to start again.
Webbe knows his stuff, having worked in the industry since he was a player in what was then an amateur era, but his love for rugby remains deeply ingrained.
You sense he feels indebted to it even though he played at first-class level for more than 15 years and then coached briefly at Treorchy.
His Wales odyssey was relatively short-lived, spanning just two and a half years. But, after making his debut as a replacement against Tonga on tour in June 1986, Webbe packed plenty into it.
“It was viewed as a fairly easy tour to prepare for the 1987 World Cup. It was anything but,” Webbe recalled.
“In the Tonga game they had this prop who was literally just going around the field with a permanently clenched fist just hitting anyone who came near him – and getting away with it.
“There was so much violence, so many fights breaking out.
“This prop punched Adrian Hadley and he was laid out. Tudor Jones, who was our physio motioned to me to go on and the rest is history.
“After the game, Hadley and Bleddyn Bowen had injuries from the fighting but had to walk to the hospital as all the ambulance people were at the game.”
Better was to come. Webbe got the chance to perform on the ultimate stage the following year at the inaugural World Cup, scoring a hat-trick in Wales’ pool win against Fiji.
But he did come a cropper when he got sucked into trying to win more than just the game.
“Before the tournament started, the players gathered in this hall and a beautiful Mazda car was wheeled on to the stage,” he explained.
“We were told it would be awarded for the best try of the tournament and immediately Mark Ring began devising moves we could use to try and win it.
“Against Fiji, after I’d scored two tries, we were defending and Ringo shouted, ‘Mazda, Mazda’.
“I said ‘no chance’, but he was adamant so we embarked on this move that involved me coming in off the wing and run- ning a line up the middle at high speed.
“Just as the gap opened up I got nailed by their full-back, his head smashing into my jaw. I was knocked out, but managed to stay on the field and score another try – and that try was actually nominated for the Mazda!”
In the end, Kiwi great John Kirwan won the Mazda for a sensational try against Italy, and Webbe’s tournament ended in tears when manager Clive Rowlands sent him home on safety grounds after his head injury.
Once that disappointment subsided, though, Webbe knew it had been an experience to cherish.
“In that hall when they brought out the Mazda, I remember seeing Kirwan and thinking he looked like Ivan Drago, the Russioan boxer off the Rocky film,” Webbe said.
“He spotted me and said, ‘It’s Glen Webbe, isn’t it?’
“I was chuffed and amazed that he knew me, but then I thought, ‘Why shouldn’t he know me? After all, I am an international rugby player’.”
For all Webbe’s pride in having played for Wales, it is Wales who were actually lucky to secure his services.
Having been consistently ignored despite getting the better of his rivals in the domestic game, Webbe would be asked on a weekly basis whether he believed his exclusion was down to being black.
But he refused to use the issue as an excuse, even though deep down he had no idea why the call hadn’t arrived.
When it did, it was only after the prospect of losing Webbe to French rugby appeared to force the WRU’s hand.
“I rounded the legendary Serge Blanco to score a really good try against Biarritz while on tour with Crawshays and received an approach to play in French rugby,” he said.
“I needed what was known as a green licence off the WRU to be able to go, but when I asked them they said they wouldn’t grant it, that they had plans for me to play for Wales.
“So I stayed. In a way I regret not going, but I just wanted to play for Wales so much.”
That Webbe, who grew up in the tough Ely suburb of Cardiff, never played for his home city and instead became a leg- end in the colours of Bridgend, is something that seems quite incongruous.
His mother and father, Islyn and Mike, came to the UK from St Kitts in the early 1950s but didn’t meet until they arrived.
The couple eventually settled in the Welsh capital, Mike working in the steelworks and Islyn as a nurse at the old St David’s Hospital.
One night, after returning from a match with the Wales Youth team, Webbe got into conversation with some of the fringe squad.
They advised him that there were cliques in the Blue and Black dressing room, and that he would be better off making his name elsewhere.
Bridgend were keen, and it became a match made in heaven.
So integral was he to the Ravens as a strikerunning winger, so central did he become to their game plan, that his old ambition to play for Cardiff petered out.
It was at the Brewery Field where Webbe made many of the “friends for life” that he so fondly references in rugby conversation.
One of those friends, Gareth “Alfie” Thomas, would go on to win 100 caps for Wales and captain the Lions.
“I remember before Alfie was called up by Wales I bet him £100 it would happen before the end of that year,” said Webbe.
“I told him he didn’t re- alise how good he was.
“He said I was just saying it to be kind, that I didn’t really mean it. But I meant every word.
“I think that was 1995 and then he went to the World Cup and made his debut and scored four tries in the game against Japan.
“When he came home the first thing he did was offer me £100. I didn’t have the heart to take it.”
Webbe, along with Bridgend hooker Ian Greenslade, became a confidante of Thomas to the extent that the former Toulouse player disclosed his homosexuality to them years before he did so publicly.
“I guess he may have been testing the water to see how it would be received, but nothing changed to us,” said Webbe. “He was still the same old Alfie, a good lad. One of the best.”
He added: “Rugby to me is like life. It’s lots of different people from loads of different backgrounds, all different abilities, all shapes and sizes, all trying to get on and reach a common goal.
“You can’t succeed without the people around you. It’s the same in business – I think you have to adopt the philosophy that you’ll do the best you possibly can, but you need the synergy with others that they are going to do their best as well.
“That’s ultimately what teamwork is and for me it all comes from rugby.”