Neath RFC’s long-time team secretary David Shaw once utterly nailed it by saying of the club’s legendary prop Brian Williams: “When he played, there was a sense that everything and anything was possible.”
Williams passed away of a suspected heart attack 15 years ago today. He was just 46.
A man blessed with the strength of Popeye and the resolve of an ancient Celtic king, he was the embodiment of how Neath as a town liked to see itself: tough, uncompromising and intolerant of fools, but also warm and friendly. Team-mates revered him, opponents feared him, respect came from all.
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When he retired as a player in 1995, Rugby Special Wales paid tribute via a short film with accolades from some of those closest to him in the game. The then Neath rugby administrator Brian Thomas said his sort “come around about once every 10,000 years.
“Pound for pound he’s probably the strongest man I have known, so there was nothing wrong with his scrummaging.
“His lineout techniques and his presence there were out of this world.
“But his main attribute was with the ball in his hands. He’d invariably take it off people because of his strength through farming.
“We said that’s the thing we have to focus on, with more people joining him.
“We literally built a side around his characteristics.”
Ex-Wales front-five forward Thomas wasn’t awed by many.
He once told this writer how he had been brought up on tales of the legendary crash-tackling Wales centre Claude Davey, the Scott Gibbs of his day. “No-one hit harder,” Thomas reckoned.
But Williams was a man apart, even in Thomas’ eyes.
As the Wales selectors continued to ignore the prop’s selection claims in the early 1990s, Neath’s team boss thundered: “It’s an absolute disgrace that he is not an automatic choice. Are the people who pick the team blind? Don’t they recognise an international player when they see one.”
He said he had worked it out that on the basis of being left out of so many squads, Williams was at best seventh-choice in his position in the national selectors’ eyes at the time, adding: “That is absolute insanity, an indictment of just what is wrong with Welsh rugby.”
Williams did actually win five caps, all under Ron Waldron, his old coach at Neath.
Most in Neath will still have a story about the prop.
Ex-team-mates recall in wonder how he once confounded doctors by returning to rugby just months after having a forearm lacerated in an horrific farm accident.
On his return to training, he could have been forgiven for easing back into the old routine.
Instead, he bombed clear on a cross-country run, making it back into the The Gnoll minutes before any of his fellow squad members. Possibly, he could have had a coffee before any of them joined him.
A club trip to France saw Williams and his fellow Neath team-mates taken out to a farm where the locals were breeding bulls.
Brian Thomas invited some of the players to get up close and personal with the animals — as you do. After Andrew Kembery had been chased and ‘flattened’ by one of them, a particularly angry beast who’d ‘snorted, bowed its head and scraped its hooves into the dust’, the front rowers Kevin Phillips and Williams jumped into the ring.
“By that stage, even Brian Thomas was starting to get twitchy,” remembers Gareth Llewellyn, who was breaking into the Neath squad at the time.
“Brian Thomas shouted: ‘Get out, get out. This is over now. We’ve finished’.
“The farmers [Phillips and Williams] were having none of it and within seconds they were doing the matador thing, swishing cloaks above their heads and stepping to the side when the bull ran towards them.
“It was unnerving to watch. After seeing what had happened to Kembery, I thought there was a fair chance we could see someone seriously injured or worse.
“I thought there was a fair chance I was going to see somebody die.
“Kevin got himself into a bit of trouble but managed to get out of there and behind the safety barrier.
“The next thing the bull ran at Brian.
“He tackled it around the neck and the animal took off, charging around the ring with Brian holding on for dear life. He was eventually shrugged off but pulled himself up and used his skills as a farmer to calm the bull.
“Even the French were astonished.
“They went from laughing at us to being stunned into silence at what Brian had just done.”
It was a Crocodile Dundee moment without the hat with corks. Williams injured his knee in the episode, ruling him out of a game with Beziers a few days later.
Maybe it’s the most famous off-field story on Williams.
On the pitch, he hit the headlines in 1994 after delivering a haymaker in the direction of Stuart Roy. The then Cardiff player said after the game, almost in admiration according to the following evening’s South Wales Echo: “It was the punch from hell. Thirty years of sheep-farming went into it.”
Roy’s right eye was closed and after the match the future Wales coach Alec Evans had to drive him to Cambridge to take a medicine exam the next day. Evans slept on the floor in the player’s lodgings.
Amateur era fun and games?
That’s the way many saw it at the time.
But Williams was more than just tough as teak.
With his speed around the field and great strength he was like a back-rower and a prop rolled into one.
When New Zealand faced Neath in 1989, the All Blacks were shocked by the Neath No. 1’s ability to rip the ball clear at mauls.
Really, he wasn’t big enough to play prop.
Apparently, he always wished he’d been a couple of stone heavier.
But maybe that would have detracted from his mobility.
When he played it was as if Neath had 16 players on the field.
Watching him was a sporting experience to savour.
He is still hugely missed.
There will never be another.
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