The painful birth of professional rugby

THE ARRIVAL of real silverware in Glasgow last year with the Guinness Pro12 trophy, Edinburgh’s presence in a European final and a fresh excitement around the Scotland team suggest Scottish rugby is finally back among the big boys of the game.

About time, too. As the professional teams prepare to head into a new Pro12 season and ever-daunting European arena, the game appears light years from the humiliating days of Scotland’s elite players travelling in cars and coaches for games in Wales, hopping between several training venues day to day and struggling to attract more than one man and his dog to matches.

But is it? In this special Sportsmail series, we look back on how professional rugby exploded into Scottish sport, why it became embroiled in bitter wars between the governing body, the Scottish Rugby Union, and the clubs that had built the sport over 130 years, and fell off the coat-tails of its Irish and Welsh rivals.

Two decades on, the men entrusted with making professional rugby work, from the first director of rugby Jim Telfer to the first official chief executive Bill Watson, marketing director Phil Anderton and a tranche of pro players, open up on the pain of the first decades and why Scottish rugby has taken 20 years to emerge from the shadow of their Celtic cousins.

Telfer, a Scotland and British and Irish Lions captain and coach, left his role as headteacher at Hawick High School in 1993 to become the SRU’s first director of rugby. When the International Rugby Board met in Paris and declared that the game would suddenly turn professional, their hand forced by the ‘World Rugby Corporation’ — led by Australian media mogul Kerry Packer — plan for a lucrative rebel league featuring the world’s best players, he was tasked with plotting a new path for Scotland.

A lifelong fan of the oval ball, the Borderer welcomed the game turning professional, believing that it would end the sham of players being secretly paid in the top countries, and enable rugby to become a true global sport.

The challenge was how to keep Scotland, a country of five million people and around 15,000 adult players, at the world table, as the professional revolution took off.

‘The main thing for me at that point,’ recalled Telfer, ‘was how we could keep the strength of our game, the strong grassroots and club identities we had, and not have all of that swept up and lost in professionalism.

‘I felt that by creating professional district teams, everyone in Scottish rugby could invest in the professional game. I was optimistic then that we could attract thousands of people to get behind districts in the way they did when they faced the touring All Blacks and Springboks before then, and really drive pro rugby forward. It’s fair to say it took a lot longer and was more troublesome than I thought.’ The SRU swiftly became embroiled in a bitter running feud with Scotland’s leading clubs and former internationalists that would last a decade. To Telfer’s rugby plan, Watson brought the business direction demanded to turn an amateur governing body into a professional one.

A chartered accountant who played back-row for Boroughmuir and won 10 caps for Scotland in the 1970s, he had left Edinburgh to manage electronics companies from the UK to the USA and Australia. Over 30 years, he revitalised companies, shifted some, closed others and opened more at the vanguard of a global electronics explosion, but nothing prepared him for life inside Murrayfield.

Looking out over his beloved Meggetland, now 67 and the hair a bit greyer and thinner, he narrows the eyes as if to peer more clearly into the memories of those early years of pro rugby.

‘In 1997, when I came in, the decision to launch four district teams had been taken, they had played their first European matches in 1996 and there was a plan in place,’ Watson added. ‘I was brought in with the remit of professionalising Scottish rugby and the way the business was run, how staff were managed, with new systems and structures for a governing body that had for the previous 100 years been run by amateur — many very capable — club volunteers.

‘It was a massive challenge but, for me, a big Scottish rugby fan, it was an exciting one.

‘Quite quickly, I discovered real fears within the game. A gap had begun to open up even before the game turned pro between us and the leading nations, which the national team was doing its best to paper over, but I was warned that Scotland would be left behind unless we got pro rugby right.

‘Then, we were investing around £1.8million into each of the four teams, and I soon discovered that the leading English sides were spending £8m per annum. The obvious question then was: “How do we close the gap with that kind of difference?” Not only that, how do we keep our best players here when English clubs come calling — we lost internationalists such as Gregor Townsend, Andy Nicol, Gary Armstrong, Doddie Weir and others — because they will always go to the best market.’

For Watson, the four teams were already unsustainable and within a few months he advised the board to shelve their plan and merge the Borders, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Caledonia Reds into two city-based teams — Edinburgh Reivers and Glasgow Caledonians.

Watson explained: ‘The decision to merge four teams into two was financially driven, in the sense that a £1.8m budget was nowhere near enough to compete, but ultimately was about how we gave our players and teams a better chance of being competitive.

‘This was a tough time for the players and coaches, but I had come from an industry where decisions like that were crucial to the success of the business. The problem was many in Scottish rugby were still thinking as amateurs. I don’t include Jim (Telfer) in that because, although he didn’t agree with the decision, he understood the business imperative that meant we had no real choice.’

Scotland’s bright new pro era was shaken, around 60 of the first tranche of brave players to quit day jobs and sign up to the revolution made redundant and the fire of anger within Scotland’s leading clubs at the time was stoked.

With Watson ensuring SRU staff kept their counsel, club voices raged loudest in the media. Former Scotland winger, and Melrose director of rugby Keith Robertson, put together an alternative plan shaped around an eight-team league of the top two clubs in each of Scotland’s four districts.

A ‘Gang of Four’ legendary Scotland captains sprung up — Finlay Calder, Gavin Hastings, Jim Aitken and David Sole — and took their arguments against the SRU plans around the country with a roadshow, exhorting clubs to vote against the union and instead allow the top clubs to pilot the professional era.

Robertson recalled: ‘We believed it was a massively wrong decision which would stifle potential investment in the game, and I still believe that going down the district route held back the development of our game significantly in the last 20 years.

‘For professional rugby to succeed in a country the size of ours, we needed serious inward investment from entrepreneurs — and we still do.’

The heat of that challenge outside Murrayfield was significant, but Watson found little respite inside the corridors of power as a battle for control raged between the general committee — which had been representing the union on global bodies for decades — and the new full-time executives.

The bitter in-fighting boiled over in 1998 with the resignations of leading committee men Duncan Paterson and Charlie Bissett. Watson turned for help to the UK’s leading law lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern — fresh from a decade as the UK Government’s Lord Chancellor — and invited him to head a review of Scottish rugby.

The review panel, also featuring eminent journalist and former Scotland player Norman Mair, Sir William Purves, former chairman of HSBC, ex-international referee Norman Sanson and Alan Chainey, then director of the Centre for Sport and Exercise at Edinburgh University, embarked on a mammoth trek of travelling the country for public and private soundings over the course of 1999 before publishing a roadmap for all elements of the game.

‘It was a step forward and we got some clarity,’ said Watson. ‘Lord Mackay didn’t go with it but my recommendation was to get rid of the old committee structure, which I found over time to have been very damaging to Scottish rugby.

‘There was a real problem in the first decade of the pro era over who was running Scottish rugby, and at times I felt for every step I made forward, there was a crowd of people determined to pull me two steps back. Many were genuine, well-meaning rugby guys, hard-working administrators from amateur clubs who put hours into it, and it was just difficult in a new era for them to suddenly grasp where the new divisions lay between strategy, policy and day-to-day decision-making. But it was certainly no way to run a business.

‘We had amateur volunteers sitting in meetings of the International Rugby Board around the world with powerful chief executives from South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, England and the others, and some things our guys were reporting back to us at Murrayfield turned out to be fundamentally wrong simply because they hadn’t understood it.

‘I pushed to join them in 1998 — I was finally allowed to in 2002, the year before I was fired. We improved the finances (SRU income rose 51 per cent to £26m from 1998-2003) but I have no doubt that had I been in there a few years before it would have more significantly changed Scottish rugby finances.’

A key theme in this brief series will be money. It was at the heart of the decision in Paris in 1995 to make rugby ‘open’. While rugby was ‘professionalising’ globally in the 1990s, the decision was actually sparked by two Australian media barons, Packer and Rupert Murdoch. Packer signed up the world’s best players at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, including Gavin Hastings and most of the Scotland squad, who accepted that they would never play for their countries again. Murdoch offered the southern hemisphere unions an alternative — £35m-a-year each for 10 years to launch Super Rugby and Tri Nations competitions on his pay TV channels. The unions took it and persuaded their northern hemisphere counterparts in Paris to agree to let money come into the sport.

TV cash was at the heart of the UK’s bid to catch up and the SRU’s share of the deals changed after Watson’s intervention.

Ireland had launched with four provinces and, with the Irish RFU being a ‘union of provinces’ as opposed to Scotland’s ‘union of clubs,’ they had a smoother transition and turned provincial teams regularly beaten by Scottish districts pre-1995 into leading forces in Europe that would humiliate Scottish teams over the next decade.

Scottish rugby was still tearing itself apart.