JUST 1 CAP AND
BARRY Williams still vividly remembers the letter dropping on his doormat.
“I picked it up and it had the British Lions motif on the envelope,” he says, recalling that April morning in 1997.
“I thought I was maybe on standby or something, but I opened it up and it said I’d been selected to go.
“I just couldn’t believe what was happening. You couldn’t put it into words. It was just really humbling.
“I am sure the whole of Llandovery knew I had the letter because the postmen were all talking! It’s a small little town and everyone knows everyone.”
Hooker Williams was the classic Lions bolter. He was only 23 and had just the one Welsh cap to his name.
But he was on his way to South Africa which meant, among other things, postponing his wedding.
As he looks back on the whole experience 24 years on, he does so with mixed emotions.
There was the huge pride of being a Lion, but, to this day, there’s still lingering disappointment at not getting on the field during the triumphant Test series.
To begin at the beginning, the Carmarthen-born Williams grew up in a rugby environment in Llandovery, with his father Gareth a loosehead prop for the Drovers.
He took up the game at an early age, just five or six, but didn’t initially follow his dad into the front row.
“I always wanted to be Terry Holmes, a scrum-half,” he recalls.
“Back in the day, that’s how it was. He was God.”
But, at around 14, the Pantycelyn pupil was converted into a hooker when he moved up to district level and that’s when things really took off for him.
He won Welsh Youth and Wales U19s caps from Llandovery RFC and, at just 18, he was drafted on to the bench by Llanelli for their famous victory over Australia in November 1992.
“That was a great experience,” he says of that unforgettable day at Stradey Park.
Come the following summer, Williams was a young man in demand with a raft of clubs seeking his signature.
“I was having offers from Cardiff, Pontypridd, Llanelli,” he said.
“Everybody was promising everything. You know what it was like years ago with the envelopes.
“I met all these clubs and they were promising me the earth.
“But then, one Sunday night, the phone rang, I picked it up and the person on the other end said: ‘This is Brian Thomas, Neath RFC here, if you want to come and play for us, be down The Gnoll tomorrow night 6 o’clock’. And he just put the phone down on me!
“That was it. He didn’t promise me anything. It wasn’t I’ll give you this many games and this car. It was none of that.
“I sat down with my father and said ‘I’ve got to go and meet him’ and that’s what took my career down the path it went.”
Life at the Gnoll was to be a daunting initiation for the teenage hooker.
“At Neath everybody had their peg in the dressing room,” he says.
“The first training session, the boys told me to sit in this particular seat. It turns out it was Brian Williams’ spot!
“He came in and said ‘Why you sitting there, boyo?’
“I was quiet as a lamb, head down. “He said ‘Where are you from?’ “I said ‘Llandovery’.
“Siarad Cymraeg?’ he goes. “I replied in Welsh to say I did and that I was from a farming background and that was that.
“From that moment on, he took me under his wing.
“He was only 13 stone soaking wet, but the strength of the man was unbelievable.
“He typified the band of brothers at Neath. He would sacrifice himself for the badge.”
Then there was the unique approach taken by team manager Brian Thomas.
“Brian was way ahead of his time,” said Williams.
“He was doing video analysis in the early 1990s, watching games on the old Betamax!
“He would have a list of things on paper, he would know how many people have given away penalties.
“If a player was over so many, they would be in trouble.
“I remember Adrian Varney, the flanker, gave away 10 penalties in one game.
“Brian had been warning us and warning us about our penalty count and saying whoever goes over so many, he would whip them.
“You know the old white flag posts? He bent Varney over the physio bench and hit him six times across the arse with his pants down.
“That was the Neath mentality. They were different breeds.
“Neath, in the old days, was Neath, you either loved or hated them and that probably brought the best out in us.
“You would train together, go out together, you’d do everything together. You were united as a group
“You were brothers and you would do anything for each other.”
Williams made a rapid impact in his first season at the club, so much so that he was called on to the bench for Wales’s opening game of the 1994 Five Nations against Scotland, just days after his 20th birthday.
He would have to wait a couple of years yet for his first cap, but that November he got a taste of international action when Neath took on South Africa at The Gnoll in a brutal encounter.
“That was probably the most violent game I played in,” he says.
“Thinking back, it was just thuggery all the way round.
“It was a Wednesday night down in Neath, down the main avenue. It was like Beirut, it was.
“They were physical, we were physical. Neither side were going to back down.
“You had a sense what it was going to be like from the first few minutes.
“You had to join in to look after yourself.
“Yeah, ok, it went over the top, people running 50 yards to get involved in things. If it happened now you would be in jail.
“But it happened that night and it’s gone down in history because people still talk out it 27 years on.
“It was an experience of a lifetime. “Everyone always talks about the Battle of The Gnoll, don’t they? It’s still well known.”
After being an unused sub – something of a career tale – for both Tests on the 1996 tour of Australia, Williams finally won his first Welsh cap against France in September of that year, marking the occasion with a try after just two minutes.
But never could he have imagined that season ending in Lions selection, especially as he went on strike at one point because Neath were blocking a lucrative move to Richmond.
“I was only on peanuts, something like £10,000 a year,” he recalls.
“Richmond came in and it would have changed my life financially.
“But Neath were holding me to my contract.
“In the end,
I went on strike and
said I’m not playing anymore.”
The matter was resolved and Williams’s return to action saw him hit top form.
He remained behind Garin Jenkins and Jonathan Humphreys in the Wales pecking order during the 1997 Five Nations, but others were taking note.
“My agent, Mike Burton, told me Fran Cotton was going to come down to France to watch me play for Wales A because they were thinking of me for the Lions,” he recalls.
“I said ‘How can they be thinking of me, I am third or fourth choice in Wales?’
“Anyway, Cotton comes down to the South of France and, I’ve got to admit, it was one of those nights where everything went well for me.
“I had a very good game, I was man of the match, everything went perfectly.
“He came to see me after the game, shook my hand and said: ‘I was right to come down to watch you’.
“I still thought nothing of it. I just thought he was being polite.”
But come the big day came the big news as that letter landed on his mat.
“I told my girlfriend, Diane, I was selected to go,” he recalls.
“She said ‘You can’t go, we are getting married!’
“I said ‘I’m sorry to say, I am going. We will get married when I come back.
“You are lucky to get one go with the Lions’
“Thankfully she stuck by me. She is still here now!”
Just days later came another big moment as Richmond came back in with triple their first offer.
“My wife didn’t really want to go to London,” he says.
“I handed her the fax, she looked at the money and said ‘I think we are moving to London, aren’t we?’
“The two clubs had to sort the transfer fee out then and, in the end, it was about £120,000 it cost Richmond to get me out of my Neath contract.”
With his future resolved, it was then out to South Africa with the Lions, which meant working under a certain Jim Telfer, the forwards coach.
“That man was something he said.
“Him and Ian Mcgeechan blended together so well.
“Mcgeechan was the nice guy, Telfer was the bastard. It was good cop, bad cop.
“Telfer was a big man for rucking and he used to hold a stick out which you had to go under to make sure you were entering the ruck low enough.
“If you hit it, he would smash you with it!
“He was some man.
“There was one chat he gave to the forwards, when he said we have got to climb Everest today.
“It’s 24 years ago and I can still remember certain things he said.
“The hairs still stand up on the back of my neck thinking about it.
“That’s a memory you will never forget, the things he was saying.
“He was a tremendous person.” different,”