Welsh rugby greats Barry John and JPR Williams dominated world rugby with skill and daring do that saw Wales at the very top of the tree.
As golden eras go, it is hard to imagine one better than the period in which Wales paraded the extraordinary talents of Barry John and JPR Williams.
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It’s half a century ago, but Wales were pretty much unbeatable in those days . . . they won three Grand Slams through the period, and both John and Williams were at the heart of a famous British and Irish Lions triumph in New Zealand.
History is easily lost, and much that happened 50 years ago simply disappears in the mists of time. But when Barry John and JPR Williams died within a few weeks of each other earlier this year, their deeds sprang back to life. Not just in Wales, where they were embedded in the national consciousness, but pretty much everywhere they played.
JPR always said Barry John was the best player he ever saw. So did most of the men who played with and against him. He had a ghostly presence on the field . . . everything seemed so easy to him as he dictated matters through extraordinary vision and educated kicking that drove opponents mad.
Williams, likewise, seemed to know just where to run at just the right time. His combination with outstanding wingers like Gerald Davies and JJ Williams created an enormous number of tries and were very much part of the edge that Wales had over so many of the teams of their era.
It was, of course, a different game in those days. Forwards still involved themselves as a pack in fierce battles for the ball. The old-world ruck was in play, and the more men you could get there with flailing feet, the better chance you had of getting the ball. Going forward was vital, since the team going forward in those days was given the scrum put-in from indeterminate breakdowns.
It meant forwards were largely out of the way when backs got the ball, and with people like Barry John and JPR Williams on hand, three-quarter play of the time was much more expansive. Wales won just about everything.
Forwards like No.8 Mervyn Davies, and the Pontypool front-row of Charlie Faulkner, Bobby Windsor and Graham Price dominated, and in Gareth Edwards they had a scrum half who still rates as one of the best to have played the game.
Edwards’ long pass did much for the magic that people like John and Williams fashioned. For those who saw them play, the years since have done little to dull the mental pictures their skill painted.
John did everything with such calm authority they labelled him ‘King John’, and the great Welsh lyricist Max Boyce created a poem to reflect his role in Welsh life titled “The outside half factory”. It became part of Welsh folklore.
John’s celebrity was such in Rugby-mad Wales of the time that in the end he just couldn’t handle it. When a young girl actually curtsied when meeting him, he decided it was out of hand, and retired at 27 . . . pretty much at the peak of his powers. Just one of the nine stanzas in Boyce’s song makes the point:
‘But now the belts are empty,
came a sadness with the dawn.
And the body-press is idle,
and the valley's blinds are drawn.
Disaster struck this morning
when a fitter's mate named Ron
Cracked the mould of solid gold,
that once made Barry John.’
John Peter Rhys Williams was a high achiever on many fronts. He started playing senior Rugby at Bridgend when he was 18, and excelled in 55 Tests for Wales and on two winning Lions tours to New Zealand in 1971 and South Africa in 1974.
He retired from international Rugby in 1981, but continued playing club Rugby until 2003, when he was in his 50s.
In those glorious amateur days when people played simply for the love of it, JPR kept going until he was a club third-grader at the end of a 40-year career in which the great deeds of his youth morphed into an unmatchable education for the young men around him. He finished up club president at Bridgend in his 70s.
On top of his life-long Rugby involvement, Williams managed to complete a University degree in medicine and build a career as an orthopaedic surgeon. And in his youth he was a top-level tennis player. At 17 he won the British Junior tennis title at Wimbledon, but by 19 he had made the Welsh Test team and decided Rugby was his game.
I first saw Williams play when he visited Australia as a 20-year-old with the Welsh team of 1969 and played a Test on their way to New Zealand, and again when he terrorised the Wallabies at Cardiff on their 1975-6 tour of Britain. Wales won 28-3 that day.
The last time I saw him was in 1978, when Australia surprised a Welsh team expecting an easy tour and won two Tests. JPR Williams finished up playing flanker in the second Test to cover a multitude of Welsh injuries.
Welsh Rugby these days has lost much of the lifestyle base that made it so strong in the time of JPR Williams and Barry John.
The game thrived in the days when coal mines produced men of steel who grunted away in the tight while backs ran free. It thrives today in different ways, as the Wallabies discovered at the Rugby World Cup in France last year.
The new imperatives of the collision game, and its more stifling defence, make it harder to produce the sort of play that made Barry John and JPR Williams such legendary performers. We are unlikely to see their like again.
