Wales have a way to go to emulate JPR’s record
The sideboards are still as long as when he went careering round the rugby world like a tank commander in charge of his very own Panzer division. The indestructible symbol of Wales in the Seventies and the two greatest Lions’ victories from the same decade, the man best known by three letters of the alphabet turned 70 yesterday. Apart from the silver hair, he looks as fighting fit as in the days of yore.
JPR was never one to make the slightest concession to human frailty during his pomp and reaching his allotted three score years and ten is no reason to start changing the habit of a lifetime. The trademark thin white bandana is just about the only bit missing from his choice of combat headgear.
Few of the modern warriors are likely to give as much blood in their time as Williams did in his, for the Lions, Wales, London Welsh and Bridgend. By his own assessment, an informed one as an orthopaedic surgeon, he gave ‘two pints’ for his hometown’s cause when an All Black put a hole clean through his right cheek.
The 40th anniversary passed before Christmas, long enough to have healed the wound if not the collective failure of the New Zealand party at the Brewery Field that day to offer even a half-hearted apology for what the Williams family considered a deliberate act by the prop, John Ashworth.
The wound required a lot of needlework, enough for 30 stitches but not enough to stop JPR rejoining the fray. “I didn’t seem to suffer pain as much as the average person,’’ he told me years later in one of the understatements of any sporting season.
Had they heard about that before the match, the All Blacks could at least have tried to use that as some sort of twisted mitigation, that they were only pushing Williams’ pain threshold to still higher levels.
This, remember, is a man who broke a cheekbone once against Scotland and played on as though nothing untoward had happened. He belonged to a generation who kept their suffering to themselves rather than encourage the opposition by letting them see it.
“I regarded it as a sign of weakness if you needed treatment, unless, of course, there was something seriously wrong,’’ he said in the book Lions of
Wales. “There were times when I was hurt but I’d never show it.’’
The week after Wales got back to beating England, a ritual which JPR managed without fail on an annual basis, is as good a time as any to assess where he stands among the greats.
In terms of Anglo-Welsh history, there is a persuasive case to be made for placing the fearless full-back at the very top of a distinguished pile. When it came to beating England, JPR stands today as unique, not a word to be used lightly given the superstar nature of his team-mates.
There was the Pontypool Front Row, Allan ‘Panther’ Martin and Geoff Wheel locking the scrum, Merve The Swerve at eight and Terry Cobner, Gareth and Barry, then Benny at halfback, Grav and Steve Fenwick in midfield, Gerald and JJ on the wings. Standing out in that lot took an awful lot of doing but there were times when JPR managed it.
He is the only member of that team to have played 11 times against England and never lost, from 1969 to 1981. Had the British Boxing Board of Control’s rule awarding a Lonsdale Belt for three successive title defences applied to rugby, JPR would have won England outright three times over.
His relish for unarmed combat was such that he made no distinction between the hits on the training ground and those made in the Test arena. The unrelenting ferocity of his tackling forced the Lions coach, Carwyn James, to ban his full-back from training on Mondays for most of the historic 1971 tour of New Zealand.
He did so for the protection of those battered and bruised from the previous Saturday. The measure had the added precaution of taking the midweek team out of the firing line rather than risking pre-match damage by exposure to one of JPR’s exocets.
“He banned me from Monday training because I was injuring too many of our own players,’’ says JPR. “I was phenomenally fit then and I used to do a lot of scrimmaging against the front row.
“I remember once tackling John Spencer, then the England captain, when he came back inside and hurting him as a result. There were a few other heavy tackles and so, for most of the tour, I spent Mondays swimming.’’
On the bus journey to the final Test decider at Auckland Park, JPR reacted to the nervous tension all around him with a promise: ‘Don’t worry boys. I’m going to drop a goal and it’ll win the match’. He said it with such an air of nonchalance that the rest dismissed it with a ‘yeah-of-course-you-will’ disbelief which could not have been greater had he informed them that he was going to win the Open golf championship the week after returning home.
Williams’ drop-goal expertise at that stage amounted to the grand total of two successful attempts, at club level. There he was talking about landing one against the All Blacks with the series in the balance.
He proved as good as his word, not from in front of the posts but way back on the ten-metre line, a missile which ultimately proved enough to give the Lions their only series win in New Zealand on the strength of a draw, 14-14.
It was his first, and last, drop during a Test career of 63 matches when he became the only full-back whose tries outnumbered his goals, 6-5. Having described himself as ‘a flanker playing at full-back’, he ended up in the back row for Tondu 3rd XV and stayed there throughout 15 seasons before bowing out at 55. Unique? You better believe it.
“Don’t worry boys. I’m going to drop a goal and it’ll win the match” - JPR before final Lions Test in 1971