The legendary Pontypool front row of Charlie Faulkner, Bobby Windsor and Graham Price have gone into sporting folklore.
During their 1970s playing pomp for Wales, the Lions and Pooler, the trio were nigh on inseparable, on and off the pitch.
Charlie's recent funeral was a private affair - 'exactly as he would have wanted it', says Pricey.
Here, in a special column, Graham pays tribute to his great friend and team-mate by recounting some of the brilliant and true stories of the Pontypool front row.
GRAHAM PRICE
I'd been made aware Charlie was unwell, but it wasn't until I visited him in hospital that I realised just how bad it was. Whilst there, sitting by his bedside, thoughts invariably passed through my mind, recollections of the time we were in our pomp as international rugby players.
People used to believe the Pontypool front row was indestructible. Certainly we had our own little motto at scrum time, thought up by Charlie: 'We may go up, we may down, but we never go back.' It was Gerald Davies he first said it to and the phrase just caught on. Thereafter, we always had our own game within a game that we had to win.
Pushing the opposition back at scrum time, to win a penalty, meant as much to us as any of those memorable tries you have seen the Welsh backs score, including Gareth Edwards' epic for the Baa-Baas against New Zealand, or the widely acclaimed greatest try in Wales history rounded off by Phil Bennett against Scotland at Murrayfield.
Rugby teams, it is said, are made up of piano movers and piano players. We were very much the movers, the water carriers, providing the foundation for the gifted backs like Gareth, Benny, Gerald, JPR and others to strut their brilliance.
It is such a shame Charlie didn't have the opportunity to see the recent 'Slammed' documentary of those 1970s halcyon days on the BBC. He would have enjoyed the moment when Gerald, tryscorer supreme himself, spoke of the huge contribution the Pontypool front row made to the team.
Let's rewind momentarily for younger readers. We came together, at Pontypool RFC, for the 1972-73 season - Charlie as loosehead prop, Bobby as hooker, myself as the tighthead - with our great coach Ray Prosser putting in place his template for a successful team. Get the scrum right, he would say, and everything else will fall into place behind it. Which it did, for club and country, as a Wales example I will give shortly demonstrates.
With Charlie we got the scrum right; he was the final piece of the jigsaw and we had a forward pack that became dominant at club level.
In 1975, against France in Paris, we had the distinction of becoming the first front row from one club to be selected en bloc by Wales. We went on to play 19 Tests over five seasons, won the old Five Nations five times, four consecutive Triple Crowns and two Grand Slams. Had Charlie not been dropped in 1977, it would have been three Grand Slams.
We were also the first club front row to be chosen by the Lions, a record that stands to this day, and that led to a song being made about us and being nicknamed the 'Viet Gwent', after the Vietnamese jungle fighters.
Suddenly we were thrust into the limelight. Bobby was okay with that, he didn’t mind a bit of attention. Charlie and myself, of a quieter disposition, were rather uncomfortable with the new fame, albeit we weren't complaining. I suppose it increased the mystique of the dark arts of the scrum, and what went on, something only fellow front row forwards will be able to fully understand.
I shared a room with Charlie for every one of the Tests we played together, got to know him well, and knew he was conscious, even a little paranoid, of his age compared to others in the team. It became a talking point among outsiders. How old really was this new prop Wales had unearthed?
A journalist, in an endeavour to discover the truth, even went to Newport Registry Office to try to find out, but could find no record of Charlie Faulkner. He was looking in the wrong place. Charlie was simply our nickname for him. The journalist would have found what he wanted had he looked under Anthony George Faulkner!
Those of us closest to Charlie knew full well he didn't even arrive at Pontypool until he was 32. By the time he was 34, he was an integral part of the Wales Grand Slam side of 1976. If you're good enough, you're young enough.
The following season, looking for a younger, more mobile model, the selectors dropped Charlie for a game against France in Paris. It was a mistake they were never to make again.
Bobby was under so much pressure at the scrum, so low because our loosehead was in trouble, that he couldn't strike with his foot and had no option but to hook the ball back with his head. That meant no channel one quick ball for our brilliant backs, no channel two ball either for our No.8 and back row to work the very moves we'd planned in training during the week.
We lost 16-9. The Grand Slam had gone. They say you don't really appreciate someone until they're not there. In the changing rooms, our coach John Dawes approached Bobby and me to say 'Don't worry, it won't happen again.'
It didn't, Charlie was never dropped after that. He was the grand old age of 39 when he played his last game for Wales. He was, actually, 36 when he joined me and Bobby for the Lions.
Order restored, Charlie was back with us when we won the Grand Slam again in 1978. In the game against Ireland we were really under the cosh, it was an attritional battle, they were throwing everything at us and had a scrum inside our 22. We were under enormous pressure. Charlie, Bobby and myself had successful individual careers, but together we became a unit that was greater than the sum of the parts and it showed that day.
We shunted the Irish eight backwards. In that one moment they seemed to deflate, fell apart, while our players grew in stature and we went on to win a triple Triple Crown. The fans didn't really notice what we did, the Press didn't, the TV commentators didn't, but Gareth Edwards, Phil Bennett and the rest certainly knew how that scrum turned the game our way.
In the Grand Slam match versus France that followed we were up against Gerard Cholley, Alain Paco and Robert Paparemborde, the best front row we met. France took an early lead, but on their own put in at a scrum we turned the tide again. I did a dip and lift against Cholley, Charlie and Bobby stayed tight and pushed Paparemborde back, the ball spilled out. Their back row were wheeled out of position, Gareth Edwards and Phil Bennett spotted a sudden opportunity on the blindside, we went over for a try and went on to win.
The Prosser adage of get the scrum right first and foremost and everything else just seamlessly clicks into place.
Mind, we weren't adverse to some dark arts, gave as good as we got. Bobby took the field for one game in Paris with a headband on. He'd had his ear bitten at scrum time the previous season and wanted protection. This time he was being punched, the kind of thing the referee couldn't see with 16 bodies packed down, and he told Charlie he'd had enough. Next scrum he told Charlie to step back a fraction and as the two teams went down, instead of striking for the ball he just booted their second row Alain Esteve straight in the chops.
Esteve was as hard as they come, a huge bloke, dubbed one of rugby's 'most frightening figures'. He simply stood up and instead of retaliating looked Bobby in the eye, smiled and winked at him. A 'Well if that's your best shot' bit of goading, I guess.
As you can imagine, we didn't like taking a backward step, but even Bobby, as tough as they came himself, was a little spooked by this.
'Charlie, what the heck do we do?' he asked.
The reply. 'Tell him he's wanted for a phone call'.
Quite why Charlie came up with that one I will never know, but that genuinely happened in the heat of Wales versus France battle.
The fun we had. The tales we can tell.
If I may finish with a couple of funny off the field stories. On tour to Japan, we were told the hosts liked a drop of whiskey. Armed with this knowledge, Charlie acquired a bottle of Johnnie Walker. As we arrived at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, we asked for a meal from room service.
The waiter duly brought the food up and Charlie, in lieu of a tip, offered him a tumbler of scotch. You know what the Japanese are like, very polite, don't like to say no, so this guy, doubtless desperate to get back down to his job in the kitchen, gulped it down in one go and turned to head off.
Of course, Charlie took this to mean he liked the whiskey and handed over a second shot. Again too polite to say no, the waiter gulped it down in one. Again and again - until the sixth or seventh time, when he just made a bolt to the bathroom to throw up.
Charlie's face was a picture!
We had everything paid for on tour, flights, accommodation, meals, except phone calls. Back then, of course, there were no mobiles and you couldn't just direct dial, you had to go through the switchboard.
Charlie wanted to ring home, but didn't want to pay for it. In the team room, a mountain of beer around us and let's just say most of us rather jolly, he spotted a phone on the wall.
'Do you think I can use that to ring home?' he asked.
'Yes, just tell them you're Mervyn Davies', we told Charlie. As captain, Merv had special privileges. His phone calls to Wales were free. He was the only one.
Over Charlie wandered, picked up the receiver. 'Hello, my name is Mervyn Davies, I'm the Wales captain and I'd like to make an international call to Newport, South Wales,' we heard Charlie say, giving the switchboard the appropriate number.
'Thank-you, we're quite busy this evening but I will phone you back in 20 minutes when I make the connection,' came the reply.
We carried on drinking for half an hour or so when the phone rang and we told Charlie to answer.
'Good evening, I have an international call here for a Mr Mervyn Davies. Is he there please?' said the switchboard person.
Charlie looked around the room, and suddenly asked the rest of us: 'Anybody seen Merv?'
No, came the reply.
'Sorry love, he's not here,' said Charlie, promptly hanging up the phone.
Priceless!
He never made those errors on the pitch, mind. As we were ordered to do lap upon lap around the pitch in training, we were told rugby is about 80 per cent fitness, 10 per cent ability and 10 per cent luck. But you make your own luck - and Charlie certainly made his.
The three of us were together through thick and thin. Our jerseys, one, two, tree, were there next to one another when we entered the dressing room, so we sat together discussing the game.
If we went for a walk, say to the cinema in Cardiff city centre, we'd naturally default to Charlie one side, me the other and Bobby in the middle. It just happened naturally.
It was an incredible period, on and off the pitch. The memories will never leave.
