Webbe would be one of today’s superstars
Lovers of rugby nostalgia should find time amid the World Cup excitement to track down Glenn Webbe’s autobiography The Gloves Are Off which has just come out.
Timing is everything and in Webbe’s case he was simply born 20 years too early. In the modern game he would have been a superstar but he retired the year rugby went professional and, along with many others of that era, frustratingly missed the boat. Not that you will hear him complain, he had a ball and so did we watching him play, often wearing his American Football gloves and tights on frosty nights.
Webbe was an exotic creature but a Rolls Royce winger. Athletically he was really a 400m man and struggled to engage top gear for the first 20 yards or so but he had dancers’ feet and comfortably the best outside swerve in the game. He also had the best left handed fend in Welsh rugby and an educated right boot if he needed to chip and chase. Once he hit top speed only Olympic 110m hurdles finalist Nigel Walker had more gas.
He was also nails, courtesy of working on the building sites in his youth and 1,000 press ups every morning, and could arm wrestle any Test forward into the dust. Arm wrestling – how very 80s, every rugby night out featured an arm wrestling challenge at some stage. Must have been the stronger ale back then. And he was durable – 286 tries in 422 games for Bridgend. You just don’t see stats like that from outside backs anymore.
But Webbe had an Achilles heel. He couldn’t begin to play on the left wing. His exquisitely balanced in-out swerve which worked beautifully with ball in his right hand just fell apart when he carried in his left, he had no right hand fend, his left foot was useless.
And that was a problem because Glenn was a contemporary of Ieuan Evans who, having started his career in the centre, moved to the right wing. It was a desperately tight call, for the first couple of years I had Webbe well ahead of the West Walian but the selectors were always suspicious of Webbe’s flamboyant personality and eventually Evans made the spot his own.
Webbe is sometimes listed as the first black player to represent Wales but that’s not quite true. Mark Brown, the long-legged Pontypool flanker, beat him by a couple of years, and racism – conscious or otherwise – is sometimes cited as a reason for Webbe’s paltry 12 Wales caps but that’s not as I remember it.
The overwhelming factor in Welsh selection back then was always the poorly disguised preference given to certain favoured clubs. When it came to dashing backs, the selectors, known as the Big Five, automatically looked to Llanelli, Cardiff, Swansea and occasionally Neath. Hairy arsed forwards? Those four plus the Gwent hard cases from Pontypool and occasionally other wild men from the East. Webbe, although proudly Cardiff-born and bred, played for Bridgend who are neither East nor West and certainly not establishment. They were rarely looked on kindly by the “Big Five” who rarely visited the Brewery Field
As well as modestly chronicling his career, Webbe’s book is also a breezy, good natured romp through the laddish Welsh rugby scene of the 80s and early 90s. By preference it should be read while necking a B52 or Dirty Banana, and listening to a compilation album consisting of the likes of Sister Sledge, Eurythmics, UB40, Pet Shop Boys, the Christians, U2 and other 80s icons. The mood music is everything.
Webbe and his Cardiff butties Mark Ring (Ringo) and David Bishop (the Bish) were rock stars in Wales, they just didn’t get paid anything other than a little folding money in brown envelopes and prize money in the remarkably unregulated and almost underground British Sevens circuit, that helped them keep the wolf from the door. There’s another book to be written on that Sevens scene one day.
They gigged twice a week for a decade or more in front of 10,000+ crowds and if a boy band did that now they would be millionaires many times over. Ringo and Webbe – the latter nowhere near as often as he should – went on big stadia tours as well with Wales but that thrill was denied ‘Bad Boy’ Bishop who famously made just the one Wales appearance. When working for the
South Wales Echo back then I would often drive back to the Cardiff office late at night after a midweek game to type up the report and follow ups for the morning paper. The main edition of our sister paper, The Western Mail, would be rolling as I left and there, across Wood Street by the late night station café, the paper was being sold literally hot off the press.
More often than not – come rain, sleet or snow – the Bish, Ringo and Glenn, if he had made it back from Bridgend, would be loitering anxious to read of their exploits before returning to their bar or nightclub of choice. They played rugby in an endearing almost comic book hero sort of way. The rewards were negligible save for the strut it put in their steps. And ours.