The morning sun and brilliant blue sky make the view of Swansea Bay from Aberavon beach front spectacular, but it is bone-chillingly cold and those who are out and about are wrapped in multiple layers of clothes with hats providing extra warmth.
Evidently, Richard Hibbard hasn’t received the memo.
When the former Wales rugby international arrives for our interview, he is dressed in a Green Bay Packers top and black shorts, seemingly immune from the elements and appearing keen to redefine the definition of the word ‘hardy’.
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“How are you doing?” he shouts across, trademark bonhomie to the fore.
We are in The Front bar and restaurant that Hibbard owns. It is big and impressive and the general manager Chris and cleaner Molly are friendly and engaging company in the 20 minutes before Hibbard arrives. The place is closed to the public for the day because the staff are having their Christmas party later.
“Will you be there?” I ask Hibbard.
“I’ll pop along,” he replies. “There’s wine tasting this afternoon because I’m changing the wine menu, then they’ll go out. They couldn’t have a party over Christmas because everyone else was out and we have to be working.
“But I’m sure they’ll have a good time.
“It’s like looking after a rugby team — after a hard pre-season you take them out for beers and food.”
The ex-hooker also owns The Hideout Cafe in Aberavon Shopping Centre. “There’s nearly 50 staff across the two places now. You want to get things right because you’re responsible for people’s livelihoods.
“My wife Louise runs the cafe and she’s brilliant, a great partner in everything I’ve done. All the years of rugby, all the business ventures — I wouldn’t have been able to do any of it without Lou.
“My general manager, Chris, runs this place and he’s good as well.”
Our chat is taking place as it’s a year since Hibbard retired as a rugby player, a decent time for a catch-up and to ask how life has turned out.
His stint as a player ended at the age of 38 — “my body has finally said enough is enough,” he said at the time — and he left amid tributes from coaches, fellow players and supporters, who warmed to the commitment he brought to every performance.
There were 38 caps for Wales and three for the British and Irish Lions.
And he is now a successful businessman.
Not bad for someone who admits he craved direction as a teenager, who didn’t like education and who dropped out of two college courses.
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“I wasn’t sure what I would do,” he says.
“Education wasn’t really for me.
“People are just cut out for different things and have different interests.
“I went to college and did a public services course because I thought of following my brothers into the army. In my second year I did a course in computers. I didn’t finish either one. I think there’s something in me that doesn’t do authority, that doesn’t do teachers and stuff.
“All three of my brothers are in the steelworks. My dad-in-law was there, my best friends are there. If you’re from Port Talbot, there’s a fair chance you’ll end up in there. Hundred percent I could have worked there. I yearned for some sort of direction, something I could chuck myself into. I’ve always been the same. Whatever I’ve done, I’ve always thrown everything into it.
“I began my rugby as a prop, winning a cap at under-18s. Then, I found training and weights, lost a ton of weight and had a go in the back row. But the Ospreys coach Lyn Jones told me when he was going to sign me: ‘You have two choices, mate: You can either be an average back rower or a very good hooker. It’s up to you.’
“I became a hooker.”
Looking around The Front, I ask Hibbard if the 19-year-old version of himself would have believed he’d one day be in charge of such a place after such a distinguished rugby career. “If someone had told me then how the last 20 years have panned out, I wouldn’t have believed them,” he says.
It was almost too good to be true as a player. “From day one of being a pro in rugby, I was always scared of losing it, losing being a professional, whether through injury or whatever. You see boys dropping out of the game and you never, ever take it for granted. You always appreciate playing and doing something you love for a living. I was always worried it might be taken away, so I was always planning and trying to think of something that I could do if it went.”
Strangely, for someone whose Wales career spanned nine years, Hibbard didn’t play in a World Cup, but in 2013 he featured in all three Tests for the Lions in Australia. It was on that trip that he famously came close to decreasing the Irish population by one.
Rewind to the final training session before the decisive third Test in Sydney when a mistake from Hibbard resulted in Jonathan Sexton sending a volley of abuse his way, like an intolerant schoolteacher telling off a recalcitrant child.
In that moment, two worlds looked set to collide as Sexton, a perfectionist product of St Mary’s College in Dublin, confident and officer class to his boot laces, looked across at Hibbard, of Glan Afan Comprehensive School in Port Talbot, tough, uncompromising and not known for tolerating such public scaldings without demur.
In his excellent autobiography, Bomb, Adam Jones recalls of Sexton’s decision to rollock Hibbard: “It takes a brave man to do that, because Hibbs has a short fuse and could easily have knocked him out. I could see his eyes narrowing into a death stare, which is a sure-fire sign that the red mist is descending.”
Fortunately for Sexton, there was distance between the pair at the time.
How does Hibbard recall those events? “Given that it was the team run before the final Test, there was a fair bit of tension and I’d made a mistake on the left-hand side of the pitch. I ran it wrong — I hold my hand up.
“Sexton suggested we run the same move on the other side of the pitch, but he decided to change the call and we were running a different play but I hadn’t heard as much, so it went wrong again.
“He said something to me.
“I swear to God…the old me glanced at him for a few seconds. I thought I was going to wipe him out. If I had got to him I don’t think it would have gone well for him.”
What cut the ice? “Nothing, really. I was still angry going into the game.
“Fair play, though, our backs coach Rob Howley pulled me aside after the session and said: ‘We wouldn’t have picked you if we didn’t think you were ready for it.’
“I rarely spoke to Howley, because he dealt with the boys behind the scrum and I was a forward, but he did well for me that day, coming up with some nice words.”
There was another memorable occasion when Hibbard’s tolerance levels were tested.
Featuring for Wales as a replacement against South Africa in 2008, he found himself played off the ball by a couple of 20st Springboks props.
What’s a man to do? Accept the situation or let those involved know he wasn’t exactly happy with how life was panning out at that very moment? Not known for having a Zen temperament in those early years as a pro player, Hibbard chose the latter course.
“They tried to hold me at a maul,” he says. “You are not allowed to hold in that situation, so I let them know I didn’t want to be held.
“Two gigantic props just pulled me along and there was a bit of a scuffle, but that’s the way it was. I’d back myself.”
Hibbard enjoyed playing against South Africa because “you know what you are going to get: straight up and down, a proper man test”
The thinking is that as a player Hibbard would have taken on the world if doing so would have moved any of his teams even a millimetre closer to victory. The boy from Fairfield in Port Talbot isn’t the type to back down and he didn’t shirk a challenge.
But off the pitch he admits one episode did prove appallingly hard to deal with.
When he was 25, his mother Siriol passed away unexpectedly.
“It was a hell of a difficult time,” he says. “I only had my mother. Yes, I had three brothers, but Sil was the rock, the mother, the dad, the enforcer, the carer.
“I didn’t know my dad. He disappeared before I was even born. He’s never been in touch, even at the height of everything for me in rugby. He probably knew not to.
“But my mother did a fantastic job.
“She was only 58.
“One of my brothers rang me at 3.17 in the morning to tell me the news. For the next three weeks straight, I woke at that time every morning: 3.17am.
“It wasn’t as if she’d been ill over a long period. It was out of the blue, with no warning.
“We just lost her in the night.
“Something had happened earlier in the evening and my brothers took her to hospital, but you always hope things will turn out well.
“Then I had that call.
“It was a bad time.
“I was playing for the Ospreys at the time and they were great. They gave me some time off and were really supportive. Johnno [the region’s then director of coaching Scott Johnson], Sean [Holley] and all of them were brilliant.”
Hibbard rates Warren Gatland up there among the best coaches he played under. “I got on with most of them,” he says.
“Johnno was a bit of a riddler. You’d go in the office wanting to say your point, but you’d come out and he’d made five different points and never even spoke about yours. He was different, but he was also good to me.
“Gats was very, very, very good. He understood international periods and what needed to be done.
“Lyn Jones was different with his man-management.
“He’s a fantastic bloke, a rugby man through and through, and an interesting character who can really push buttons. With me, he pushed buttons in a way that I wanted to prove the f****r wrong constantly. Not that he ever gave me grief, but he knew how to get a response.
“But the stuff he looked at and could see in a game was incredible, the small details. He taught us the little ‘cheats’ that you don’t see so much nowadays. There were trick plays he told us about at the Ospreys that he was probably doing with Neath years before it all got so advanced.”
Then there was Gareth Jenkins, who gave Hibbard his first Wales cap.
“One of the nicest human beings you will ever meet,” says Hibbard of Jenkins. “That said, I can see why people say he had the Wales job 10 years too late, because rugby was changing and he was a bit old school.
“There’s a place for old school, but maybe he needed a Ying to his Yang.
“I went to Australia with Wales in 2007 when the jet-lag protocol was a couple of beers on the first two nights, just to get acclimatised and sleep at the right hours. Fair play, it really got the boys together. We almost beat them.
“It was sad to see how it worked out for him.”
Hibbard featured in Wales’ World Cup training group under Jenkins in 2007, with warm-up matches against England, Argentina and France to be negotiated. “I remember the first day in camp he put three teams on the board, saying: ‘Look boys, everyone’s going to get an opportunity. It’s up to you to put your best foot forward.’ The usual spiel.
“I looked at the teams and I wasn’t in any of them or on any of the benches.
“So I went up to him afterwards and pointed out that I hadn’t been named in any of the teams.
“He replied: ‘You won’t be going.’
“That was on the first day in camp. So I had to do all the fitness and training out there while knowing I wasn’t going to the World Cup.
“That’s not a great memory.”
As a Test No. 2, Hibbard came up against some of the best hookers in the world. The South African Bismarck du Plessis was strong and big, he says, while fellow Springbok John Smit was impressive, along with Stephen Moore of Australia. But maybe the one who made the biggest impression was Argentina’s Mario Ledesma. “I won my first cap against him, in 2006,” says Hibbard. “I hit him in the scrum and it was like hitting cement.”
Time is passing by and the gent sitting opposite me is a busy man.
There are no major regrets about his career, but he sometimes wishes he had stayed in the moment more. “Sometimes you just don’t take it all in,” he says. “That happened to me a bit at the Ospreys, with all those legends around me. I never just stopped and fully appreciated it all. A coach told me once that you never played with the same squad twice, and he was right, with changes every year.
“I’d take a few of my mates along to Ospreys socials and the boys ended up knowing them, or I’d pop off home early to meet up with my mates from outside the game. That’s something I wish now that I’d balanced better. I was living locally so I could do that. When I was playing for Gloucester, I couldn’t do it because I was living away.”
There’s still time to talk about perhaps his happiest time in rugby. “Playing for Swansea was brilliant,” he says.
“I was a kid facing Neil Jenkins and their other big players on my debut against Pontypridd. It was an eye-opener but in a good way. You had free rein to go out and play.
“They used the Welsh Premiership well in those days, with the boys who had missed out with the regions playing in it and also young players who were pushing through. I played more than 80 games for Swansea and the Prem helped me loads.
“Keith Colclough and Clem were coaches there and they were fantastic — brilliant blokes who knew the game inside out and made it fun as well.
“They were influential for me. I used to cut a few corners and do what I wanted but they reeled me in and helped me develop and I’ll always be grateful.”
The Front was taken on two years ago, with an old Burger King restaurant gutted and a swish new business set in its place.
Hibbard has developed his own drink, Mortal Bunny Spiced Rum, and talks expansively about all that’s involved. "It's my own blend," he says. "The distillery makes it for us. It started out with Lou wanting to do our very own house gin with our own label. We approached a couple of companies and they also told us they could do rum as well. That was it — my eyes lit up because I love rum. There's always been a bit of a pirate in me.
"It’s taken about a year to design. A fantastic guy, Paul Watson, has looked after us all so well, from branding to bottle shape and just the details. I enjoy that. It’s the rugby in me. Details matter. Local rugby clubs and bars in the area are now carrying it. I’m really pleased."
What he misses is not waking up battered and bruised on a Sunday after a game the day before. He also misses the camaraderie of being part of a squad.
That said, he is helping out as a forwards coach at Aberavon Harlequins, the club where it all started for him. “They’re a good bunch of boys there and I wanted to give something back,” he says.
Doubtless, his efforts are appreciated as much as he enjoys being part of the set-up.
A contented individual is Richard Hibbard.
Still living locally, but a man who has come a long way.
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