In the week that John Peter Rhys Williams was born, his hometown of Bridgend played host to an Egyptian performer named Kitao who styled himself as ‘the man they could not kill’.
Chris Williams, writing in the book More Heart and Soul, says of the visitor: “He swallowed fire, washed in broken glass, survived attempts by 12 men to strangle him with a noose, and allowed swords to pass through his body.
“The highlight of his act was to lie on a bed of nails whilst six men stood on him and broke large rocks on his chest with a sledgehammer.”
In the same league as JPR Williams himself 25 years or so later, then?
That sounds about right.
Few rugby players in history have had such a disregard for their own well-being on a pitch as the full-back who won 55 caps for Wales between 1969 and 1981. Rare was the match that he finished in one piece. “I used to say that I spent half my life breaking bones on the rugby field, the other half putting them back together in the operating theatre,” Williams, an orthopaedic surgeon by profession, once noted.
Sunday sees the anniversary of what many view as the most iconic moment of his career.
It continues to resonate, 46 years on.
For a sports-mad schoolboy, 1976 was a golden year. Southampton beat Manchester United in the FA Cup final, Franz Klammer fairly flew down a mountain in Austria to win the Olympic downhill skiing gold and Wales won a Grand Slam, helped by a tackle from Williams that doubtless remains stuck in the memory of all who saw it. Tottenham finished 17 points off the pace in football’s top flight, but, hey, every day can’t be a sunny one.
Let’s home in on the Williams hit.
Wales were ahead 19-13 against an outstanding France side who were themselves chasing a Grand Slam. But Les Bleus were attacking in waves and looked capable of breaking through at any point.
Finally, the decisive moment arrived.
With just minutes left on the clock, the visitors to Cardiff worked the ball wide to Gourdon, a big and powerful wing renowned for his hard running. The try line beckoned, with no obvious Welsh defence to talk of. Look at the footage today and the Frenchman seems nailed-on to score.
But he didn’t.
Suddenly, a red-clad figure flashed into proceedings to blast the ball-carrier clean into touch via a shoulder barge. For a split-second it appeared the work of an authentic superhero. Perhaps it was.
Gourdon ended up in block 2, row nine of the stand or thereabouts. The poor chap must have wondered what had hit him.
A double-fist pump from Williams completed a passage of play of bone-shaking drama.
The renowned Scarlets statistician and club historian Les Williams was at the National Stadium that day. Of the hit that saved a Grand Slam, he says: “It’s something I’ll never forget.
“I can see it now.
“All looked in danger of being lost when Gourdon received the ball because a converted try would have put France level and Wales wouldn’t have won the Grand Slam.
“Then JPR made it across and hit him into touch.
“He turned around and clenched his fists in satisfaction and the crowd roared. Everyone understood the significance of the moment.”
It continues to be remembered.
A few years ago, a taxi driver taking a journalist to JPR’s home in the Vale of Glamorgan for an interview with the old full-back had no difficulty recalling the events from decades earlier, telling the scribe of Williams and his famous challenge: “He was like a man stopping a train with his shoulder. And then he just walked away, no bother.
“Brilliant.”
The event came with such force that Gourdon’s ancestors might have felt it.
If memory serves correctly our TV set seemed to shake, or maybe it just seemed that way, with the entire room rising in acclamation of what had just unfolded.
Of course, nowadays such a challenge would be considered illegal, shoulder charges having failed to stand the test of time in the eyes of law makers. Under the present rules, Williams would have seen a penalty try awarded against Wales and probably a card to go with it. The penalty try bit was the result in 2014 after Liam Williams shouldered Cornal Hendricks into touch in the final seconds as South Africa defeated Wales 31-30 in Nelspruit.
But in the mid-70s such a means of stopping an opponent was permissible, unfortunately for Gourdon, whose day it wasn’t to be a matchwinner. “There was no other way to stop him, because he would have crossed our line had I tackled him around the legs,” Williams later told WalesOnline.
“So I had to take him out and the only way I could do that was to barge him.
“It would have been a red card or a penalty try or both now.
“Liam Williams did a very similar thing against South Africa and a penalty try was awarded. I felt sorry for him, because what are you supposed to do — let the guy score? Actually, you’d be better off doing that these days and hoping they miss the conversion.
“But as the last line of defence your instinct is to do what you have been taught and that is to take the man out and prevent him scoring.”
I put it to Williams that the moment summed him as a player. “They shall not pass!” he laughed.
“It was a Grand Slam tackle.”
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How good was Williams? Well, he appeared in both Ian McGeechan and Sean Fitzpatrick’s dream XVs and his Bridgend and Wales team-mate Steve Fenwick is on record as calling him the greatest player he ever played alongside.
McGeechan said of Welsh warrior who frequently wore a headband while playing: "He was the original, the template on which other full backs have been built. And listen, I’ve played with and coached some of the greats, from Andy Irvine and Serge Blanco and Gavin Hastings to Christian Cullen and Percy Montgomery.
"I’m not just saying this, but JPR had no weaknesses. Perhaps his speed over the ground was average, but he made up for this by his early reading of developing situations in the game. He really was the complete 15.
"His impact on any game in which he was playing was immense.”
Here’s Fenwick’s view, as related to the South Wales Argus : “It’s difficult to pick the best player I played with but if pushed I’d have to say JPR.
“He had this amazing mental attitude and you never thought you were going to lose with him in the team.
“When we played together at Bridgend, he would come up to me and say we were going to change the course of the game in the next five minutes.
“I thought he was having a laugh but he was totally serious and nine out of 10 times he would do something that changed the game.
“He wouldn’t give in for anything, his tackling was fantastic and his attacking skills were great.”
Yet off the pitch JPR was different from some of his illustrious contemporaries. The man of medicine didn’t suffer fools, for a start, and was never afraid to tell it as it was, please or offend. On one occasion, he upbraided Gareth Edwards for throwing a wild pass which allowed Willie Duggan to score a consolation try. “I gave him a real rollocking along the lines of; ‘How dare you let them cross my line.’ We’d won the game 32-4, but that wasn’t the point,” he told Peter Jackson in Lions of Wales.
Maybe time has mellowed him, though — it’s hard to say.
Certainly when WalesOnline rang him for an interview on the occasion of his 70th birthday, he could not have been more helpful.
“Perhaps people might have misunderstood him a bit compared to, say, Phil Bennett, Gerald Davies or Gareth Edwards,” says Les Williams.
“But JPR deserves all the accolades going.
“He was a fantastic last man and a player everyone else in the team could rely on — a player Wales could rely on.”
In that one moment against France on March 6, 1976, Wales needed their No. 15 that day to deliver, and deliver he did.
Few single sporting instances can have been more inspirational.
It was Williams’ greatest moment.
And one of Welsh rugby’s as well.
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