Super-fit Price still on the run, even at 70
Graham Price turned 70 the other week whereupon he treated himself to a steep run for two-and-ahalf miles through all his yesterdays. Few would have thought of celebrating the biblical three-scoreyears-and-ten by taking off on a climb guaranteed to burn the lungs and leaden the legs. Fewer still would have actually gone out and done it but then Price has been doing that sort of thing all his life.
His choice of run took him back to a place long enshrined in folklore, the famous Shell Grotto 700 feet above Pontypool Park, a notorious test of endurance devised by the inimitable Ray Prosser as a means of raising ‘Pooler’s’ fitness levels to new heights.
“I ran all the way up and all the way down on the morning of my 70th,’’ he says. “Then I ran halfway back up again to where I’d parked the car. I didn’t find it tough, not at all. As a player I’d do it three or four times a week.’’
That, though, was some 40 years ago when Prosser’s Pontypool could justifiably claim to be the best team in British club rugby and when the junior member of their all-Wales front row, the Viet-Gwent, was halfway through his long reign as the supreme tighthead prop in the British Isles.
From his vantage point at the top of the Grotto, Price can see all too clearly how the game has changed. The most striking difference is that for the last quarter of a century or so, it takes twice as many men to do the job he did all by himself.
Over the course of three Lions’ series – to New Zealand, twice, and South Africa – the tourists played 12 Tests. Price played in every one. Better still, he played every minute of every one.
That is why his feat can never be matched, let alone eclipsed. Those who point out that Alun Wyn Jones has also played 12 Tests for the Lions do Price an injustice. Facts are sacred and the facts of this particular matter are that Jones started and finished a mere four of his Lions’ dozen. His is still a monumental achievement but it falls some way short of Price’s.
In eight years as the most automatic of choices for Wales, Price played 39 consecutive Tests over eight years.
During that time he had to leave the field just twice, against France at the Arms Park in 1976 and Australia at the Sydney Cricket Ground two years later.
They diagnosed the first incident, an alleged eye-gouging by the opposing
“Price played in 12 Lions Tests. Better still, he played every minute of them all”
loosehead, Gerard Cholley, as a damaged cornea. “At the time I couldn’t see very much so I couldn’t do anything else but come off,’’ he says.
The early exit in Sydney followed a punch from Wallaby prop Steve Finane which broke Price’s jaw in two places. He flew home the next day at the end of the tour with the rest of the squad, his head swathed in bandages, the jaw still broken.
“I should have had the operation done straight away in Australia but they wouldn’t have let me on the plane with all the wiring,’’ he says. “That would have meant waiting for six weeks to get home.
“So I came back with the jaw all bandaged up. Terry Vaux (former Pontypool chairman) was waiting at Heathrow and he took me straight to the St Lawrence hospital in Chepstow.’’
Those blows apart, Price played every minute of his 41 Tests for Wales. Unlike today’s practitioners, the Welshman was conditioned to last the full 80 minutes, no matter how much injury-time the referee played. “As a fresh-faced schoolboy, I threw everything into my ambition to play for Wales,’’ he says. “I always trained my b ****** s off.
“I’d no problems with speed or hardness. We had no strength or conditioning coaches then so you had to work it out for yourself. I burnt more calories than I got back through my diet so I dropped two stone.
“I had a very good technique, thanks to ‘Pross’. He was one of the first to go big on fitness. He’d say: ‘Use your greater fitness as a weapon against the opposition loosehead.’
“That no longer applies because they play with two front rows. In our day we’d get to the point of the breakdown and form our scrum before the other side were ready. That way the outcome had been determined before the scrum-half got the ball in his hands.’’
Of today’s props, Price singles out the Irish pair Tadhg Furlong and Andrew Porter. “Furlong features a lot around the field as well as his work in the set-piece. Porter is a very good technician. You have to be to play on either side of the scrum.
“Kyle Sinckler lets himself down at times. I always think he’s about to go off on one. Tomas Francis was overweight when he started with Wales and I always thought he’d be second choice behind Samson Lee. Francis has worked bloody hard and done really well.
“I read that tighthead props are the higher paid than players in other positions. They’re worth their weight in gold but I have no regrets about playing in the amateur era. What I got out of the game made up for any lack of finance.’’
Furlong, Sinckler, Porter, Francis and the rest still have a way to go to emulate Price’s 75 metre run for a try in the corner on debut at the Parc des Princes. Prosser’s reaction at Pontypool Park the following Monday night made sure the new cap kept both feet on the ground.
“Pricey,’’ said Prosser. “That French prop you played against Saturday wasn’t up to match, was he? ‘Cos if he’d been any good at all, you’d never have been able to run all the way in the last minute…’’
Time for another run up the Grotto…