An anniversary quietly passed last week with hardly anyone properly taking note of it.
It was exactly 50 years since one of the most feted of all Wales rugby wings, JJ Williams, played in a capped international for the first time.
Sadly, of course, Williams is no longer with us to celebrate the occasion, having passed away in 2020.
How good a player was he? “Lightning quick — so quick he sometimes had touched the ball down before defenders realised they had even been beaten,” a colleague and famed authority on Llanelli rugby for the South Wales Evening Post back in the day once told this writer.
“He was a Commonwealth Games sprinter and his pace helped him perfect the chip and chase, but he was also a very intelligent rugby player and he believed in himself utterly. JJ had a lot of self-confidence.”
No-one could dispute how much inner belief he had.
“Did I tour with the Lions in South Africa in 1974? I was the one who scored all the tries,” he once incredulously told a reporter whose memory of events some 30 years earlier had let him down.
His proud claim was that he was never dropped by Wales. In 1979 then Wales coach John Dawes did actually tell him he wasn’t going to be considered for an autumn Test against Romania, only for Williams to inform him he himself had been thinking of retiring, anyway. The ’70s were ending and one-by-one the star turns of that golden decade were bowing out. All good things eventually come to an end.
But Williams had been a razor-sharp performer for his country. For Wales, there had been 30 capped Tests and 12 tries; for the Lions there had been seven international appearances and five tries. Touchdowns were claimed for whomever he played. In all, there were 352 from 438 games, with 163 arriving over 227 matches for Llanelli and 99 scored in a hundred outings for Bridgend. By any standard, he was prolific.
But stats alone don’t tell anything like the complete story of John James Williams, from Nantyffyllon near Maesteg, a working-class boy who walked the walk as well as talked the talk.
He was given the nickname JJ after his debut off the bench against France in 1973. Amid confusion caused by Wales having two John Williamses in their ranks, the flanker John Taylor approached the new wing over a post-match drink and said: “Right, from now on you are JJ and you (pointing to Wales’ full-back that day) are JPR.”
Success followed success for both, with Gerald Davies making up perhaps the finest of all Wales back threes.
The two wings were lethal finishers: Davies had the unanswerable sidestep; his wing partner had the extra gear.
Both scored vital tries. When Wales defeated Ireland in 1978 to complete their third successive Triple Crown, plaudits were rightfully paid to Steve Fenwick after the game of his career in the most hard-fought of wins. But it was Williams’ searing pace that took him over for the touchdown that helped hoist Wales to victory and a feat no other team had previously managed.
After he packed in playing, he launched out in the business world, becoming a self-made millionaire with his industrial painting business.
He also stayed in touch with the sport in which he made his name with work as a pundit for the BBC. His fearlessness behind the microphone vexed many. In his book JJ Williams, the life and times of a rugby legend, he told how the BBC once dispatched him to Pontypridd to cover a game after he’d expressed the view that Neil Jenkins should be dropped from the Wales team and Arwel Thomas given a chance in his place.
“I knew that would bring another torrent of abuse raging down on my head,” he said.
Gren, the South Wales Echo cartoonist, caught the mood the previous night with a drawing of a ring of steel around Sardis Road and a caption that read: “All police leave cancelled — JJ Williams is here today.”
JJ enjoyed that one, just as as he liked the comment of a local as a helicopter flew over the ground during the game. Pointing to the sky, the man said: “Look, there he is. It’s that JJ Williams, commentating from the chopper. Too scared to come down here.”
But JJ was never too scared. He always called it as he saw it, please or offend.
Even as a player he had a habit of saying things that sometimes wound up people the wrong way. Again in the book he related how he bumped into the legendary New Zealand scrum-half Sid Going after Llanelli had beaten the All Blacks at Stradey Park in 1972. “How are you feeling after that?” the Welsh flyer asked the notoriously feisty Kiwi.
Williams recalled: “He fixed me with a cold stare and just said two words: ‘P**s off.’”
Once, he rang the sports desk of the South Wales Evening Post to complain about a column that had been put together taking issue with his view that Shane Williams could not be classed as a great player until he had hit the heights with the Lions.
A 20-minute conversation followed, ending in Williams advising this reporter to go forth and multiply, so to speak.
Years later, on discovering I came from the same town as him, he could not have been friendlier, saying: “I didn’t realise you were a Maesteg boy. Come and have a beer.” Past issues all forgotten, the way it should be in such matters.
His willingness to speak without filter in his punditry made him interesting to listen to, albeit controversy continued to follow him around. Indeed, Warren Gatland took issue with him after Williams criticised Dan Biggar before the last World Cup, asking if the former wing was “really old”.
But everyone’s entitled to a view and many wanted to hear what JJ said because he was a winner. A winner to his core.
He was his own man and a world-class wide-man, as well.
Where does he stand on the list of great Welsh wings of the last 50 years? Behind Gerald Davies and Shane Williams, but probably in front of the rest, albeit Ieuan Evans would be there or thereabouts.
He was someone who couldn’t be ignored, on or off the pitch.
This Saturday he would have been 75.
This writer will be raising a glass to him.
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