Eddie Butler was my room-mate, my captain for club and country, my friend and just a good guy full stop.
My personal memories this morning are ones of extreme fondness, dating right back to the day he first walked into the Pontypool dressing room as a gangly 19-year-old who'd just left Monmouth School and had been accepted to study at Cambridge University.
Take it from me that dressing room was full of some real hard men, no-nonsense warriors our great coach Ray Prosser recruited from the valleys, who had cauliflower ears, broken noses, took no prisoners and who also helped form the bulk of the Wales pack.
