Wizards weaved magic on field and off it too

EVERY club has its share of characters but only one can lay claim to a Labour life peer as president (Baron Heycock of Taibach), two film stars among its supporting cast (Richard Burton, Michael Sheen) and the First Lady of Welsh rugby (Evelyn Mainwaring), born next door to a baker’s boy who grew up to win a Hollywood Oscar (Sir Anthony Hopkins).

Aberavon had them all and a great deal more, a club all the richer for having been forged amid the steelworks’ grime of Port Talbot. Their hard men had a suitably iron quality. John Richardson, showed his during Wales’ 1978 tour of Australia when he put a huge dent into a metal post after crashing into it. I know. I was there.

Now, thanks to the efforts of Phil Atkinson and Howard Evans, The

Wizards is being published by St David’s Press this autumn. As Burton said: “I would rather have played rugby for Wales than Hamlet at the Old Vic. To that town, Aberavon and its rugby team, I pledge my continuing allegiance until death.’’

Sheen tells the authors of being taken to see the Wizards by his ‘grampa’ “listening to the glorious Mrs Mainwaring urging on her Billy and his boys and me trying to summon up the courage to pipe up and join in”.’

Her boy Billy, now 76, ran one half of a formidable line-out business with Allan ‘Panther’ Martin and thereby hangs a tale. When Mainwaring won his cap, at Murrayfield in 1967, his mother made the trip to Edinburgh where she bumped into the other Wales second row, Brian Price.

“Billy had hurt his arm in training and I asked Mr Price to take care of my boy,’’ Mrs Mainwaring recalled. “He said: ‘Your Billy’s big enough to take care of himself, Mrs Mainwaring’. Then that nasty Jim Telfer hit our Billy after about ten minutes but it knocked his elbow back into place and he was all right after that.’’