Brandon Cripps has never been a man to shirk a fight. As a teak-hard prop, he didn’t know the meaning of taking a backward step during a 25-year career that brought him more than 650 appearances for “every club in Gwent apart from Newport”.
He represented Wales B and the Barbarians, but a full cap never came his way, a perceived injustice that still rankles with him deeply. There were plenty of brutal battles on the field, while he also spent more than two decades in that toughest of worlds down the pits, living through the miner’s strike of the mid 1980s.
But, for the last 16 years, he has faced a battle of a very different nature. In 2006, he suffered a horrendous leg injury in an industrial accident, with his left tibia and fibula shattered into 27 pieces.
He was advised to have the leg amputated but refused, a decision he now regrets and one which has had major consequences in terms of him requiring a kidney transplant and enduring constant pain.
But, despite everything he has been through, he keeps on fighting, just as he did as a player. He also maintains his sharp sense of humour, causing me to laugh out load a good half dozen times during our hour long conversation. He is some character and a real cult hero of Welsh club rugby.
Born in Blaina - where he lives today - Cripps grew up and was schooled in Abertillery, which is where he began his rugby journey, starting off as a second row before moving to tight-head prop. His senior debut was some initiation and the shape of things to come.
“I played against Racing Club of Paris for Abertillery in 1972 when I was only 16. It was murder,” he recalls.
“I was too young to be out there, so I was down in the programme as AN Other. That was the first time I had ever seen a man send a punch through from the second row. It nearly killed the loosehead I was playing against.”
So began a journey into the dark side of club rugby, amid a wandering career that took in spells at Newbridge and Pontypool, amid other destinations.
“It was the law of the jungle back then. It was a totally different game to now. You would come off the field all battered and bedraggled and not having a clue where the hell you were. It was like the wild west at times.
“I can remember Billy Howe sending a punch through on me in Bridgend and it cost me £2.50 to get back in the ground! He gave me a wallop. Then there was John Perkins, he got away with murder. Tread-lightly Perkins. He was no shrinking violet, I can tell you that. Bloody hells bells, he’d kick a fly’s eye out.
“Playing against Pontypool, that was always the game. I loved it because I knew it was going to be physical. Some people used to call it controlled violence. I’m not so sure about that!
“Then, when you played for Pontypool, you turned into something different. I don’t know what it is. You would go to prison for Ray Prosser. If he said kick that fella’s head off, you would. They were all the same. They were absolutely brainwashed.
“I never felt frightened going on the field. You would feel apprehensive. You knew when you went to Bridgend, for example, that they would send them through and laugh. Billy Howe and John Morgan, they would laugh at you and they had hands like shovels. Through they would come.
“Russell Cornelius tried it once at Stradey. He never tried it again because I ran at him and nearly hit him down into Ray Gravell’s garden!”
So, Brandon, is it fair to say you could give as good as you got? “Yeah, very fair to say,” he replies with a deep chuckle.
But there’s one game that stands out above all the rest in his memory bank in terms of violence.
“It was down at Newbridge during the miners strike. We were playing against Nottingham. Oh my God, they should have cancelled the game.
“Some of the boys I was playing with at Newbridge were on the picket line with me. They identified this lot from Nottingham with the miners from up there who were working through the strike. They saw them as a symbol. The name got into their heads.
“Feelings were running out of control at the time. That was the day we gave vent to our feelings. I certainly did. I shouldn’t have played.
“It was murder. There was legs being broken, people being knocked out, there were boys hitting the billboards. I shoved the loosehead up underneath the second row, nearly broke his back.
“I called this one fella a scab and he didn’t know what I was on about. He looked at me and said ‘I’m a doctor’! He was looking at the ref to say ‘Who is this?’
“They didn’t expect anything like this. They weren’t aware of it. I think we scared them to death.”
Cripps’ combativeness and his powerful scrummaging marked him out as one of the top tightheads in Welsh rugby. So when Graham Price’s illustrious Test career came to end in 1983, he hoped his moment might come as he was at the peak of his powers around that time. But it wasn’t to be.
“I was good friends with Bobby Windsor and he used to say to me ‘How you never had a cap I’ll never know’.
“Everybody thought it was going to be my jersey after Pricey finished. I was with Newbridge at the time and I was at my best then. I was super fit. I never went backwards in the scrum. I don’t ever remember that happening. I would rather give a penalty away than go back. It was a sense of pride.”
So, on reflection, why does he think he missed out with Wales?
“Being a miner, being from a housing estate, having a reputation as a hard man. There were various things they were trying to get rid of at the time. I definitely felt as though my face didn’t fit. I did my own thing and I don’t think that was asked of you then.
“Newbridge was a little bit too far up the valley for the WRU, I would say. I got in the B squad three times on the trot, but you got B caps just to shut you up.
“They tried prop after prop after prop on the tighthead. Some of them were tiny. I couldn’t believe it at the time and I still can’t.
“Against Scotland in 1987, they played Peter Francis, from Maesteg, and he had flying lessons off David Sole. As a B team, we scrummaged against that Welsh pack in training. We were only supposed to hold them, but they hit us and they went back six inches straight away.
“We would be called in to train with the full squad quite often. But when you got down there, you could smell a rat. They would segregate you and you knew then. That’s when the frustration kicks in. I said to myself I am no cannon fodder. How I didn’t walk I will never know. I was very, very, very frustrated. I often wonder what might have been.”
Cripps may have been ignored by Wales, but he was hugely respected and valued on the club scene.
“I played for every first-class side in Gwent, bar Newport. They wanted me to go down there. They were virtually camped in my house one time.
“But a lot of valley people just didn’t like Newport. I knew if I went down there, I was going to have my head kicked in. So that was one I avoided. I knew other players wouldn’t like it.”
He had a couple of spells with Abertillery and that’s where he crossed paths with a young Rupert Moon, who had arrived from the west Midlands, just as his elder brother Richard had done before.
“Rupert had a important job at the club - to fetch my Special Vat! He would go up and bring it back to me every time. It was as many as I could get down me after the game. He was my secretary.
“The drinking was too easy sometimes. Very often I got over-served! It was Vat in the rugby club and then I’d go up the town with the boys and have a couple of lagers. Lots of pubs wouldn’t sell that Vat because there was a bit of a kick in it. Oh aye!”
Pretty much throughout his playing career, Cripps was employed as a miner, a profession that saw him build up huge physical strength.
“I worked in the coal industry for 22 years, at Rose Heyworth and Cwmtillery pits. I went in at 15 and was in the timber yard until my 16th birthday and as soon as I hit 16 they said ‘You are underground tomorrow’.
“It was tough, it was hard. You had to walk three or four miles in to start your work and you were 1,000 yards down. You used to take a bottle of water in and by 10am your water was warm. In some places, you couldn’t breathe because of the lack of air. Oh it was warm.
“It gives you idiot strength. All day you are lifting and I was on the shovel for quite a lot of the time. Everybody seemed to be muscly and snarly, with a gristle. The camaraderie was the best ever. It was exactly the same in rugby because 90 per cent of the boys were miners.
“You would give vent to your feelings on a Saturday. I sometimes did Saturday mornings and would come up from the pit and play. You would really go for it then. Bloody hells bells."
After playing for the Barbarians against Cardiff in 1996 when he was 40 - “That was a special day” - he finally hung up his boots the following year. Then, a decade later, came the accident that was to change everything.
“It was May 23, 2006. I will never forget it,” he says.
Cripps was working at the Silent Valley landfill site in Ebbw Vale when his left leg got trapped under the spinning wheels of a diesel bowser.
“All the front of my leg was shattered. It was like a piece of cable that had been splayed. There were 27 pieces of bone flying about,” he explains in unflinching detail.
“From the kneecap down, all that was left was a piece of my achilles holding my foot on. There was no solid bone left at all. My foot was hanging on by my achilles and it was bouncing about. Oh it was a bad ‘un.
“It was the wheels of the diesel bowser spinning on my leg that did all the damage. It ripped all my calf muscle out. The seagulls come down and had that. If I could have picked it up, they reckon that could have gone back in as packing.
“My bone split into 27 pieces, but I didn’t pass out. I was in shock for 40 minutes. I was just lying there waiting for an ambulance and the first ambulance went to the wrong tip.
“When the ambulanceman got there, he said to somebody 'I haven’t seen anything like that before'. That’s what panicked me. Then they gave me adrenaline in my arm and I went to get up. It was absolutely bloody amazing.”
Graphic warning: The injury to Brandon Cripps' leg
When Cripps got to hospital, it was then he was faced with a fateful decision over his wrecked leg.
“They said it’s got to come off. I said no, it’s not coming off. I would die with it. My grandfather lost his leg in the pit, my uncle lost his two legs, my grandmother lost her leg. So I fought to keep it.”
Having refused amputation, the then 50-year-old Cripps underwent a corticotomy, where his dead bone was cut out.
“They cut four inches out and I grew two and a half inches back, which was a phenomenon. I had a metal frame round the leg for two and a half years. They put PH substance in. It comes out of a pig. Once it’s put in there, it will hold anything.
“The frame would help you walk and it gave you confidence. The more you walked the more you dragged the bone down. I dragged two and a half inches from somewhere, it’s amazing. I have also got a lifter in my shoe, an inch and a half, to take me up to my near normal height.
“After it happened, the doctor said me walking four metres in ten years was the best I could hope for. I said ‘I will be all right, I will force it’. When I walked into the clinic a couple of years later, he nearly passed out.”
But keeping his leg came at a cost.
“The doctor had said ‘Brandon, if I save that leg, you will be a kidney patient in ten years’ and he was spot on. After ten years, I ended up having dialysis.
“Because of the tablets I was taking to fight the pain, my kidneys just couldn’t cope. They were working their guts out to try and keep the injury clean. It was all an open wound.
“Your kidneys want that leg working. They will keep attacking it until they get it better. They burned themselves out in the end.”
Reflecting on his heavily scarred left leg, he admits: “I wish I’d had it amputated. I’ve had ulcers in it, I’ve had gangrene, I had everything chucked at me.
“It’s still swollen today and painful in the ankle 24/7, but the biggest thing it left me with was the kidney transplant. I would never go through that again, never in a million years. I lost my dignity. They sent for the family when I lost seven litres of blood. They didn’t think there was much hope. I have been through a lot, oh hell aye.
“I wouldn’t have been so keen to keep it nowadays because the prosthetic legs out there are absolutely brilliant.”
Given everything he has been through, you inevitably find yourself asking how Cripps - now 66 - has managed to stay so strong?
“You have got to get your mindset right first. I say to everybody who I see with injuries, don’t let it take you down. You are bound to have a bit of depression, but you will come through it.
“I have had a lot of dark days, but I have thousands of friends. You have got to have family and friends. My wife Debra has been a massive help. I’ve been with her 24 years.
“In the beginning, Mike Ruddock would pop in every night to Morriston. Loads of boys I played with visited me. There wasn’t a day there wasn’t someone there. At one time, I had 11 waiting to come and see me. That’s how the rugby community rallies round.”
For Brandon, with the support of all his friends and family, the fight goes on.
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