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Epub ISBN: 9781780572888
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Copyright © Jeff Connor, 2000
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First published in Great Britain in 2000 by
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This edition 2001
ISBN 1 84018 478 7
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CONTENTS
Foreword by Finlay Calder OBE
1 Jim Telfer
2 Gordon Brown
3 Sandy Carmichael
4 David Leslie
5 Ian McLauchlan
6 Derek White
7 John Jeffrey
8 Roger Baird
9 Iain Paxton
10 P.C. Brown
11 Bruce Hay
12 Gary Armstrong
13 Rob Wainwright
14 Roy Laidlaw
15 Colin Deans
16 Tony Stanger
17 Ken Scotland
18 Jim Calder
19 David Sole
20 Alastair McHarg
21 Keith Robertson
22 Jim Renwick
23 Ian McGeechan
24 Craig Chalmers
25 Alan Tomes
26 Sean Lineen
27 Doddie Weir
28 Kenny Milne
29 John Rutherford
30 Finlay Calder
31 Scott Hastings
32 Stewart Hamilton
33 Iwan Tukalo
34 Alan Tait
35 Peter Wright
36 Gavin Hastings
37 John Frame
38 Andy Irvine
39 Iain Milne
40 Gregor Townsend
Footnotes
1. JIM TELFER
The Big Controller works in an office at Murrayfield hardly big enough to hold a pack of forwards stood toe to toe and Jim Telfer, even at 60, is a large, upright man whose stature and presence fill any room. In comparison to Scottish Rugby Union chief executive Bill Watson’s ballroom-like premises a few doors down the corridor, Telfer’s work place justifies Scott Hastings’s description of ‘a rabbit hutch’. But there again, as one former international put it, ‘If Jim had wanted a ballroom he would have got one.’ Ostentation is not one of the vices of the son of a Borders hill shepherd who became the most powerful man in the history of Scottish rugby. If Jim Telfer’s name dominates this book, it is simply because he dominates Scottish rugby; virtually every life mentioned here has been touched in some way by his.
The office is decorated with wall-to-wall video tapes of every major rugby international captured on film, including the most famous Scottish black-and-white footage of all – that of Telfer dipping his shoulder into the France full-back (and now team manager) Pierre Villepreux and crashing over the line for the try that gave Scotland a 6–3 victory at Colombes on 11 January 1969. Telfer had to wait over a quarter of a century for his next win in Paris, but he has that on tape, too. He has always heeded the lessons of rugby history, but really he does not need the videotapes. Virtually every detail of every match in which he has been involved is already stored away inside his head.
The SRU Director of Rugby is famously wary of the press, but there is tea and shortbread on a little oval table and no sign of the cantankerous ogre of legend. The nerves are all in the chair opposite – the proximity of the famous can scramble one’s senses at times. When Telfer, in the small talk that precedes any interview, mentions his occasional backache, some passing insanity makes me say, ‘Perhaps it’s because you’re sat in too many committee meetings these days.’
Silence, then: ‘What was that?’
‘Perhaps you’re spending too much time sitting in committees instead of, you know, supervising training sessions.’
Suddenly I see a mental image of myself being frogmarched back out through the South Gate, but then a smile creases those boxer’s features and the man bursts into relieving laughter: ‘Aye, well, maybe you’re right.’
Things seemed to go swimmingly after that. I am, after all, from an era where I have seen Telfer and many of his contemporaries play and I know the magic words that might earn me an extra half-hour: ‘All Blacks’ and ‘rucking’. True, there is a possibly pre-arranged phone call from his secretary 20 minutes into the interview, presumably offering an escape route, but he returns to pour a second cup of tea. He has the chance to talk nothing but rugby for an hour, and of course Jim Telfer would talk rugby all day given the opportunity, even to a total stranger. His enthusiasm for the game is startling. At times he finds it hard to stay seated when recalling some famous Scottish deed of the past and the voice rises gradually, from the calm reflection when talking about his beginnings, to the famous boom when expounding his rugby philosophies. One of these philosophies is personified in his favourite saying, ‘The cream will always rise to the top’. It earned him the nickname ‘Creamy’ from his players, although no one calls him that to his face.
Born on 17 March 1940, Jim Telfer is the son of a shepherd, William Telfer, who worked on a farm near Yetholm, three miles from the English border. William and Jim’s mother Peggy are still alive at the time of writing, aged 85 and 81 respectively – a clue, perhaps, to the genetics that have given their son that famous stamina, energy and longevity. He says, ‘Because you didn’t go to hospital in those days, I was taken to an uncle in East Lothian to be born and then back to the farm. No one in the family played rugby and, really, farm workers had no history of playing sport at all. Because we lived equidistant between Melrose and Galashiels, I was a pupil at Melrose Grammar and later went to Gala Academy. I played rugby from the age of 11, but played as much cricket and took part in athletics, too. I would say I wasn’t naturally gifted at sport, but I certainly had the right attitude to be good at it.
‘I took to rugby quite well, but I was a forward, so you didn’t have to be very skilful. I was a leader even at that age: I was captain of the rugby team, cricket team and athletics team. I seemed to be able to give people orders and made up for everything else by working very hard at what I tried to do.
‘I left school at 17 and went to Heriot-Watt University to train as a teacher, but came home at weekends to play for Melrose before taking up a teaching appointment at Gala Academy. I only ever played for one club and never thought of playing for anyone else. Even when I lived and worked in Edinburgh or Glasgow, it was always Melrose. Everything I have done in rugby I owe to Melrose.
‘In the late ’50s and early ’60s there were some very good players at The Greenyards and I went through my career playing with Eck Hastie, David Chisholm and Frank Laidlaw. I was brought up in a place where rugby was a religion but, personally, I never thought of playing for Scotland: you just concentrated on the level you could attain. So it was the first team, then South of Scotland and I had no baggage to carry in the sense that my father or uncle had played for Scotland. I was just as surprised as anyone where I ended up. My father and mother were always very supportive. He would come and watch and tell me later I wasn’t very good. He was an expert, of course, but he never played.
‘I won my first cap at 23 in 1964, against France. I was leader of the pack. This was quite a big thing, quite an honour, it meant I was virtually in charge of the team. It was a wet day at Murrayfield. We were underdogs, but won 10–0. When you get to my age you can’t remember what happened yesterday, but I do remember sitting next to a player called Michel Crauste at dinner. A plate of meat arrived for me, and a plate for him, and he had a knife and just helped himself to mine. He was an uncouth so-and-so. They played me at wing-forward that day and I had never played there in my life. At 17 I was a hooker, then moved to prop, then second row for six or seven seasons. Finally I must have got brainier – I went into the back row.
‘My second cap was against New Zealand, with players like Meads, Wilson Whineray, Don Clarke and Brian Lochore in the side. We drew 0–0 and they were to become a very big influence on me. One of my fortes was putting my body where other people would not. Close to the line, I dived on the ball and wrapped myself round it and was duly kicked to bits, but I saved the try. They played a ferocious rucking game and there were no touch judges to stop it. Scotland teams were far better ruckers than they are now. In 1967–68 we had a very good rucking pack – you’ll need a long tape for this – we had good technique, always very tightly bound.
‘But it was different then. There weren’t so many phases. I’ve got a black-and-white video here, of the 1963 South of Scotland-All Blacks match. It’s like junior rugby compared to now. The All Blacks won 8–0 and there were 10,000–15,000 there at Mansfield Park. I can still name the All Blacks team.
‘They got better on the ’67 tour with players like Waka Nathan, Kel Tremain, Fergie McCormick. That’s when I really started to be influenced by the All Blacks. Particularly the forwards. Their body position, tightness, dynamism. In a way the game is a lot looser now. Eight men in a ruck is like poetry in motion. One game against England: there was an up and under, Dusty Hare caught it, Jim Calder took the ball off him and David Leslie drove and drove and drove; as he fell, the ball came back and Roy Laidlaw gave it to John Rutherford; he picked it off his toes and put Euan Kennedy in under the posts. Oh, I can remember that one all right – want some more tea? – that was a classic, almost unopposed in a way. A ruck like that doesn’t always happen. Oh, aye, I remember that.
‘Against England in 1964 I scored one try and gave the scoring pass for another two. That was the first time I remember the crowd running onto the pitch. When something like that happens, you start to think you’re the best thing since sliced bread, but they dropped me the year after. P. C. Brown took my place. There were no subs in those days, you just had to sit in the stand and watch, so that’s where I was for the Andy Hancock try. When he got the ball he never looked as though he was going anywhere, but he beat Eck Hastie, beat Ian Laughland and then Stewart Wilson. It shouldn’t have happened.
‘My last season for Scotland, as it turned out, was 1969. We got beaten by France at home and beaten in Wales. I remember they were reconstructing Cardiff Arms Park and we changed in prefabs. Graham Young, the SRU Vice-President, was playing that day. He only got one cap – he was up against Gareth Edwards. When we went to Ireland my opposite number was Ken Goodall and he had a very good game, scoring at least one try. I was dropped and never got back in again, although all through 1970 I tried to fight my way back. I think I sometimes played better after I got dropped, so maybe I should have got some more caps, I was 30, I’d played a lot of rugby and injuries were taking their toll. I managed another four seasons for Melrose, 17 seasons of club rugby in all.
‘Coaching? Well, when I was playing I was captain of Melrose and in charge of training, and as a teacher I was used to organising things. I retired in 1974 and became Scotland B coach the same year. I had a clear coaching philosophy: a fast, dynamic game, with the emphasis on the ruck because everything emanates from that – the quick ball and movement and so on. It was based mainly on how the All Blacks played, round the forwards. The backs were the extras. Scotland over the years have had more identity with the way the New Zealanders play the game than any other northern hemisphere country. We get credit for things we don’t even do well. We get credit for rucking well. But we don’t ruck well. They talk about Scotland’s ferocious rucking and actually it’s not very good. I’m still looking for the perfect ruck. It’s a discipline as much as anything.
‘The turning-point for Scottish rugby came in 1982 in Cardiff, no doubt about that. Keith Robertson was ill and in isolation and Jim Pollock arrived from Northumberland. I had never even seen him play, I’d never even met him, and he scored a try. We stayed at Chepstow, about 20 miles out: I wanted them to imagine they were the SAS, going in to do the business and coming back out again. Well, we’re maybe not as efficient as the SAS; but we don’t leave many dead, either.
‘In team talks I try to get a theme, a rhythm of what I am going to say. I sometimes look at the papers a day or two before to get a thread of what I’ll say – maybe what the opposition coach has been saying about us. I do motivate people quite well by taking players down as low as they can get, then building them up again until they think they are ten feet tall. People think I give fearsome talks now, but as a player they were far more fearsome and they weren’t recorded. The players from my era – like Ian McLauchlan, Ian Robertson, Peter Brown, Frank Laidlaw – they would say some of it was near the knuckle. Once in Argentina we won 6–3, or something. I can remember that team talk when I really went at people. I’ve mellowed a lot now.
‘At international level Scotland do work themselves up, but an hour before a game I tend to treat them all the same. For some it’s like water off a duck’s back, but when I go for players it’s usually the best players. If we’ve played badly I will pick the best players. You can destroy poor players. I’ll go for people I know I can get riled. I also name people individually. You go fifteen to one and if they are all mixed up you can miss one which isn’t very clever. But I have changed a lot. Instead of haranguing, I get them to say the things I would want them to say, because in the professional era it’s their game. Sometimes things get quite heated. I used to get knocked around because I would be shoulder-charging them, trying to get them worked up, and they were very big players, some of them.
‘Another thing: I would never become too friendly. I kept players at arm’s length, and never went drinking with them or anything like that. I never tried to be one of the boys. Once they tried to take my trousers down in the bus. After two or three seconds they realised it wasn’t the right thing to do. There is a difference between a player and a coach. Some coaches, young coaches, have lived to regret it because they have played alongside their players, they’ve come up with them, and can’t get their respect after that.
‘When I was a player the Grand Slam became a yoke round your neck. First, it was 30 years since we won a Grand Slam, then 31, 32, and by the time 1984 came round it was over 50 years and it had become a great burden. But I coached better teams than the ’84 team and they never won a Grand Slam. In 1984 Jim Renwick and Andy Irvine were on the bench. Great players. Andy Irvine was the best player I have ever seen playing for Scotland, but he never won a Grand Slam.
‘But that’s rugby. It has been my life and I wouldn’t change any of it. I’m still lucky to be involved, I’m thankful for that. I’ve played and coached some great players, men who you would happily go into any battle alongside. Because in the end, rugby is about brave men . . . and some not so brave.’
This book is for Struan Kerr-Liddell
‘Because in the end, rugby is about brave men . . .’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am immensely grateful to the players who make up this book, all of whom gave time in busy lives to talk about their past and present careers. I had always wondered if international rugby turned ordinary people into special people or whether it was just special people who played international rugby. I hope the 40 players’ stories in the following pages, told as far as possible in their own words, help answer that question.
My thanks go, too, to Bill Campbell and Caroline Budge of Mainstream for their encouragement and patience and to Gordon Fraser and the Scottish Rugby Union for their generous loan of archived photographs. Tracey Lawson, as always, was a source of sound advice and suggestions and I owe her a lot.
Above all, this book would not have been possible without the help, advice and inspiration of Finlay Calder, capped 34 times for Scotland and British Lions captain, 1989.
FOREWORD by Finlay Calder OBE
It’s difficult to put into words what it means to play for Scotland, to pull on that blue jersey and walk out onto a rugby field as a representative of your country. That special feeling was best summed up for me by one pre-match team talk from Jim Telfer, the memory of which even now makes the hairs stand on the back of my neck. It was before a Calcutta Cup clash with the old foe, England. Jim, who saved his best speeches for special occasions like that, told us: ‘To represent your country is the highlight of anyone’s life, but just remember that when you are given that Scotland jersey you are only given a loan of it. It represents everyone who has played for Scotland in the past and who will play for Scotland in the future. When your career is over you hand that jersey back for future generations.’
Reading Jeff Connor’s book and the stories of the lives of the 40 players in it, I think everyone will appreciate that all of the players involved have tried to live up to Jim’s philosophy. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that playing for Scotland makes you a humbler and better person. But then playing rugby at any standard allows you to find out more about yourself. You are a custodian of whatever jersey you are wearing and when the time does come to hand it back you should leave it better than you found it. There is humour and heartbreak in rugby, but above all I think Jeff’s book shows that there is a lot of humility and integrity too.
Finlay Calder
Lauder
September 2000
2. GORDON BROWN
For one so young, the receptionist at the Sheraton Hotel on Edinburgh’s Lothian Road demonstrates a healthy sense of priority: ‘You mean Gordon Brown the rugby player?’ she asks.
There are two Gordon Browns in residence that night. One is the famous Broon frae Troon, the thirty-times capped and three-times Lions tourist G. L. Brown from the West of Scotland club; the other is the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The coincidence has obviously caused a minor hiccup in the Sheraton bookings system and Brown the rugby player is in the ministerial Elgin Suite, busily throwing the contents of a suitcase into wardrobes and onto shelves while his wife Linda (who for many years has suffered from the chronic fatigue syndrome ME) relaxes in the background. As Brown reasons, quite rightly, ‘They’ve put me in the wrong room, but the buggers won’t be able to shift me once I’ve unpacked.’
These things tend to happen to one of the most luminous characters of any sport, let alone rugby. He’s in town to fulfill an after-dinner speaking engagement for a brewery. This is his full-time occupation now and a role he could have been born for. As raconteurs go, Brown is in the superleague.
In baggy shorts and T-shirt he looks in good shape. He’s bald from the chemotherapy, of course, he’s lost a fair bit of weight and the voice occasionally drops to a whisper; but the humour and energy are undiminished. We have an hour before his speaking engagement, a golden hour of good cheer, outrageous stories, laughter and – on my part, at least – something close to the occasional tear.
Gordon and his older brothers, John and Peter, were brought up on a council estate in Troon, Ayrshire. Peter, another great sporting eccentric, went on to captain Scotland while John, according to Gordon, was the best rugby player of all three – a ‘natural thug’ – although he didn’t take up the game until the age of 28. Father Jock played in goal for Clyde, Hibs, Dundee and Kilmarnock: he won the Scottish Cup with Clyde in the season 1938–39 and gained one Scotland cap. Jock was also a scratch golfer and West of Scotland badminton champion. At the time of writing Brown Sen. has turned 84 and is still a ‘bandit playing golf off 19’, according to Peter.
‘Mum was a great hockey player, too, so there’s a fair bit of pedigree there,’ says Gordon.
These sporting genes produced three brawny lads with natural ball-playing skills. And, as with the Calders and the Hastings and in common with most siblings, the seeds of a competitiveness that served so well later in life were sown early on at home. In the case of the Browns, this was usually with a round ball. The early ferocious kick-arounds up and down the narrow hallway of the family home, or on the huge area of waste ground on the estate, gave way to contests of a more formal nature and Gordon played in goal for Troon Juniors until the age of 16. For his conversion, West of Scotland, Scotland and the British Lions should thank an archetypal Brown incident in a game against Irvine Meadow some 36 years ago.
Says Gordon: ‘It was a West of Scotland Cup tie and the game had a huge following, around 2,000 there. We were 6–1 down – none of the goals my fault, of course – when their winger came homing in on goal. He went round me and I brought him down with a rugby tackle. Bedlam. The crowd was going mental, throwing coins and howling for my blood. There were two policemen there and for the first time in their lives they had to escort a player off the field. In the dressing-room I could hear the voices outside planning dire things for me and I ran all the way home. The Monday night, I went to the rugby club and asked to play. I honestly thought I’d be safer.’
Brown began his senior career with Marr College FP before graduating to West of Scotland, where brother Peter, Sandy Carmichael and Alastair McHarg were among the established stars. Within a year he had his first Scotland cap, although there was still a steep learning curve ahead. Brother Peter, for one, still believed he had a lot to learn.
Gordon continues: ‘There was a gutter ran all the way round our house and Peter, who had this great sergeant jump, would lick his fingers, leap up and leave the wet mark there. Then he’d turn round and say: “One of these days you will be able to do that.”
‘I never could, until one glorious night I managed it – I left the mark on the gutter. I ran back into the house, where Peter was slumped watching TV, to tell him; but of course by the time we got outside the mark had dried. To this day he still doesn’t believe I did it.’1
Peter Brown is fond of describing his young brother as ‘my best mate’. To Gordon, Peter was his hero. ‘I used to watch him from the schoolboys’ enclosure at Murrayfield,’ he remembers, ‘and dream of playing alongside my big brother, but he wasn’t in the team when I won my first cap, against the Springboks in 1969. Peter wasn’t in the squad because he hadn’t been available for the Argentina tour the year before. He was not happy.
‘I remember putting the blue jersey on and looking in the mirror. By the time we got to the tunnel I’d had it on for 45 minutes. The Boks went down the tunnel first; the steward held us back. The sounds of a piper wafted down the tunnel and we set off. The further I ran down the tunnel, the bigger and bigger I seemed to get. I was 22 years old and playing for my country. In those days we sang “God Save the Queen” and I cried and cried. I was still crying when the Boks kicked off. I caught the ball and the Boks caught me and, boy, was that a welcome to international rugby.
‘The game seemed all over in a flash and there we were – we had beaten the mighty Springboks. Back in the dressing-room I was still greetin’ and Big McHarg came over and said, “Who hit you?” I said, “No one, I’m just happy.” He came from Irvine and Irvine guys didn’t show emotions like that. But I was now upsides my brother.
‘That night I had a rendezvous with a young student from Dunfermline College of PE, later to be my wife Linda, and I told her I felt so good I could play another game. Next day I couldn’t get out of my bed, it took three weeks to get over it.’
The longed-for ambition to play in the same Scotland side as Peter was fulfilled in the Five Nations season of 1970, although not under the circumstances either had expected: ‘I usually got a phone call from a press guy before a match who would tell me the team and, sure enough, before the match against Wales in Cardiff the phone rang,’ Gordon recalls. ‘It wasn’t the journalist, it was Peter. “Great news,” he said. “I’m back in the team.”
‘“Who’s out?”
‘“You are.”
‘It was the only time in my life I doubted his parentage. But then he tore a calf muscle just before half-time and the physio, who happened to be our dad, waved the towel as a sign to the selectors for a replacement and I ran on as sub for my big brother.’
Brown’s bulk (by then he was over 17 stone), scrummage and lineout capabilities and overall aggression made him a natural choice for the successful Lions tour of 1971 – the first and, so far, last to win a Test series in New Zealand – although he failed to displace the great Welsh lock Delme Thomas until the third Test at Wellington on 31 July.
Says Gordon: ‘I had the greatest respect for Delme. He was like King Kong, biceps the size of my thigh. He and Willie John McBride, the other second-row, were like twin brothers. They went around together all the time.
‘But I got in and on the eve of the match I was rooming with Willie John. I knew he had had a voice in selection and I was babbling away, “Willie John, I’m going to play the biggest game of my life . . . Willie John, I am going to give 200 per cent tomorrow.” And of course he’s just sat there in his chair, puffing on his pipe and saying nothing.
‘“Willie John,” I said, “I will repay the faith the selectors have shown in me.”
‘Suddenly, without even looking up, he spoke: “Well, I know who I wanted.”
‘To this day I don’t know what the big bastard meant.’
Such was Brown’s lineout dominance in the third Test that the All Blacks laid special plans for the Scot in the Fourth at Eden Park, Auckland. Andy Haden has written in his autobiography of a special training session, organised with his fellow lock Peter Whiting, which involved various nefarious schemes to neutralise Brown – at one time even including Haden talking in a broad Scottish accent.
In the end, their tactics were somewhat less complicated. Brown recalls, ‘At the first lineout Jazz Muller, the prop, grabbed me and Whiting thumped me.’ Brown went off with a knee injury later in the match, but the 14–14 draw secured the series for the Lions.
Ligament, knee and tendon problems cut huge swathes into Brown’s Scotland career over the next three years, but he was still an automatic choice to partner McBride in the Lions’ second row in South Africa in 1974. This Test series was savage, with Brown in the thick of much of the action – although fellow tourist Ian McLauchlan rated him disparagingly in the pugilism stakes: ‘A hard rugby player, but he couldnae punch his way out of a wet bag’. Brown, in fact, broke his thumb when he threw a badly timed punch in the third Test.
This was the tour of the famous, and possibly apochryphal, 99 call when McBride would order his team-mates to ‘get their retaliation in first’ on uttering the magic numbers. McLauchlan insists the 99 story was ‘a load of shite’, but there is little doubt that the Lions, in those days of non-neutral referees, were determined to protect themselves at all costs.
‘The referees were giving us no protection whatsoever,’ says Brown. ‘In the third Test at Port Elizabeth the Boks had brought in some heavies to try and sort us out, the main one being Moaner Van Heerden. Willie John had singled him out and warned that he would have a go, somewhere in their own half, early on. The nearest Lion would then wade in and give Van Heerden a doing. Sure enough, after ten minutes, Van Heerden belted Bobby Windsor for no reason whatsoever and I was the nearest man; that’s how I broke my thumb.’
Broon’s various on-field Donnybrooks – his Scotland career was ended by a 12-week suspension for retaliating to a vicious stamping incident in a Glasgow District game in December 1976 – have been detailed in his book Broon frae Troon. Most good judges, however, would say there is still a chapter or two to write.
In his decade as one of the world’s leading locks, Brown had faced many uncompromising opponents: Whiting and Colin Meads of New Zealand; Benoît Dauga of France; McBride of Ireland; Thomas of Wales; and Chris Ralston of England. But none was as fearsome as the one that crept up behind the unsuspecting Scot late in 1999. ‘I had these symptoms of a groin strain that wouldn’t go away,’ he says. ‘I went to a physio and after a few visits he said, “There’s something wrong because normally you’re a quick healer and this won’t go away.” In the end, the doctor told me, “Gordon, you’ve got an aggressive lymphoma.”
‘“What the hell’s that?” I said.
‘“Cancer,” he told me. Cancer! I thought, “That’s something you die of” – this was something totally different.’
The diagnosis was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and the chemotherapy began in February 2000. By May, and the time of this interview, the tumour had receded slightly and Brown was winning his biggest fight, although he would be the first to admit that there’s still a long way to go.
Most of his friends had told me that, in a battle between the tumour and Gordon Brown, Mr Non-Hodgkin and his lymphoma would come a poor second best. When I tell him this, a wee crack appears in the happy-go-lucky facade.
‘I’ve been lucky,’ he says. ‘Normally you only find out what people think of you when you actually die. I’ve found out and I’m still here. The number of people who have rung me up and said, “We love you, Broonie.”’
It is these occasional bouts of introspection that cause concern in close friends like former Scotland team-mate John Frame; but Gordon Brown’s wife Linda has never allowed him to lapse into self-pity. At the height of the chemotherapy treatment, when the suffering was at its worst, Brown was slumped in his chair at home in Troon feeling, he admits, very sorry for himself.
‘You’re not doing very well, are you?’ said Linda.
‘Lin, my body aches and I feel sick. I’ve got sores in my mouth and what feels like thrush in my throat. I feel bloody awful.’
To which Mrs Brown replied, ‘Welcome to PMT.’
3. SANDY CARMICHAEL
The burly, obdurate Glaswegian swears he will take the identity of his assailant to the grave with him. ‘Only one other person knew, and that was Doug Smith, the manager, and he’s dead now,’ says Sandy Carmichael. Touring matches against the New Zealand province of Canterbury have often been lacerated by intimidation and violence. Canterbury players liked to perceive these games as extra-mural Tests and some of the most notable – and notorious – All Black hard men were blooded there.
Nothing before or since, however, has come close to matching the sheer brutality of the British Lions game in Christchurch in 1971.
Because it was also looked on by the Lions management as the fifth ‘Test’ of that tour, Smith and his selection team of coach Carwyn James and captain John Dawes had chosen what was generally considered the team that would contest the actual first Test against the All Blacks in Dunedin a week later. This included the first-choice props of Carmichael and the Connacht and Ireland forward Ray McLoughlin. The Lions had cut an unbeaten swathe through their provincial matches until then, with notable wins against Otago and the New Zealand Maoris and an eye-opening 47–9 victory over Wellington. The invincibility of New Zealand rugby was under threat. The Lions were no longer perceived as underdogs. But Canterbury were ready to adjust the odds.
Says Carmichael, ‘They decided to to target me and Ray. Basically, up to then he and I had screwed to the ground anything of size and strength in New Zealand. They had forgotten about front-row play. They hadn’t a clue.’
The violence wasn’t long in coming. Ten minutes into the game a flurry of punches at a lineout shattered the cheekbone of the Scotland tight-head. Just to make sure, when the Scot next went to ground he was kicked in the head. ‘You can see it on film. There’s a ruck and I go to ground and someone kicks me in the face. I didn’t realise at the time my cheekbone was broken and after some treatment they sent me out again.’ The attack had been subtly done.
According to fellow Lions tourist Gordon Brown, ‘Sandy’s opposite number just hit him in every scrum, but Willie John McBride to this day swears he never saw a punch go in.’ McLoughlin, however, broke his thumb attempting to retaliate and, like Carmichael, his tour was over.
Carmichael never uttered a word of complaint at the time. ‘Some saw that as a fault in Sandy,’ says Ian McLauchlan (who was to achieve instant fame as the Lions’ Mighty Mouse when he took over the number 1 loose-head spot from McLoughlin). ‘Others saw it as an attribute. Speaking personally, I would never have let that happen to me.’
Carmichael claims, however, he has managed to extract his own form of revenge. ‘Because I never complained then or since, it will always hang over them. If I had shown my distaste it would all have blown over,’ he insists. ‘Even now, some 25 years later, if there’s a tour match against Canterbury some New Zealand journalist will ring me up and ask about it. They are still saying they never did it and that the referee had never said, “I’ll referee the game and you can do what you f*****g like.” Which he did.
‘Funnily enough, I went back to Canterbury in 1975 with Scotland and I arrived with a big black eye after getting a whack in training. Of course, they thought I had painted it on deliberately. They can ask anything they like about that match and they will still get nothing.
‘One night at Ian McLauchlan’s house Alex Wyllie [the Canterbury flanker and captain] was there and he said to McLauch, “Sandy’s never said a word about it. I hope he doesn’t think it was me.” Even Grizzly was worried that I thought it was him.’
It remains, one senses, one of the regrets of Carmichael’s life that the Canterbury incident overshadowed all the achievements of a career that earned him 50 Scotland caps and a reputation as one of the best props of the ’70s – a player who can look back on six wins out of eleven games against England, but a man who was a lot more than a damaging scrummager. At West of Scotland – his one senior club for 32 years as player and coach – Carmichael and Gordon Brown perfected the lineout peel, where Brown would tap the ball down and Carmichael would take it on the burst in the scrum-half position and charge into midfield.
Says Brown, ‘We were playing once against Jordanhill, a brutal, brutal game. With five minutes to go we did the peel. I knocked the ball down to him and he ran through the stand-off, then the inside-centre. The back-rows are hanging onto him, there’s five guys on him and he just carried on, running through the full-back for the winning try. I swear the crowd behind the dead-ball area parted. They thought he was going to carry on through them.’
Born in Newton Mearns on the south side of Glasgow on 2 February 1944, Carmichael – like many rugby players from the West of Scotland, such as McHarg, McLauchlan and the Browns – had a soccer background. His grandfather was Alec Bennett who played for both sides of the Old Firm and won 11 caps for Scotland. Carmichael’s formidable strength came from his schoolboy days as a shot putter and, later, from Highland Games during the summer.
‘Big men should always play football before they play rugby,’ he says. ‘Rugby doesn’t teach co-ordination of the body. McLauch and I used to joke about second-row forwards, the lowest form of human life. I’d say to him, “They can’t even clap their hands together,” and he would reply, “No, Sandy, you’re wrong: they can’t clap their hands AND nod their heads at the same time.”
‘I’ve seen some second-rows couldn’t put one foot in front of another, but all the greats played football.
‘As for strength training, the first time I ever touched weights was in 1969, before the tour of Argentina. The joke was that Broonie started with the bar and then put the collar on. But that year was the start for me. With McLauch, Big Al [McHarg], Broonie: that front four were together for most of my 11 years of rugby for Scotland. I went through six hookers and it has always been a test to name them all – a competition for a fleecy jacket or something. People got five but never got them all. They always missed out Derek Deans of Hawick. We had a very light pack, but technically very good. McLauch would struggle to get 15 stone, I was about 15.7, Big Al was about 14.3 with his wet socks on. I wished he weighed then what he weighs now, but seriously, he pushed well above his weight.
‘When I arrived at West of Scotland Peter Brown would be out there on the pitch in the shadows in the darkness, on his own, playing right foot against left. He was like that. A total eccentric. McLauch and I met up in 1962 at West. Jordanhill had thrown him out for holding some sort of immoral party in his digs and I’ve played with him or against him ever since. He’s a grumpy wee bastard, but we are great mates. We’ve fought too many wars together not to be friends.
‘Those games against France, they were wars of attrition. You had to forget about ethics, you just had to be totally damaging. One game in Paris, McLauch was playing against Gerard Cholley, who they were trying on the tight-head at that time, and Ian came over and said, “That big bastard is tearing my eyes out.” Cholley, a boxer, was gouging McLauch in every scrum.
‘I asked him what he had done in return and McLauch said, “Well, I whapped him and that didn’t even make him blink.”
‘“Have you headbutted him?”
‘“Yes, that did NO good at all.”
‘“I’ll tell you what we’ll do. At the next scrum we’ll hook the ball and take a quick step back, they’ll fall to the floor and you can kick his head in.”
‘So that’s what happened and next minute Cholley’s getting to his feet scratching his head and looking puzzled and McLauch is hopping round in agony. He’d kicked him so hard the nail came off his big toe. Cholley, it didn’t even dent him.
‘The strongest prop I ever played against was Ray McLoughlin. He made a comeback in 1971 to try and get in the Lions team, but he had come back as a loose-head, having once been a tight-head. I was 27, he was maybe 33 or 34 and someone said before the game, “You’ll have no problem. He’s an old man, you’ll screw the arse off him.” The first scrum, I thought, “This is not funny.” He played loose-head, all right, but with his feet in the tight-head position – totally the wrong angle. It was the only time in my career when I thought I might come off the floor and in fact I spent all the 80 minutes trying to stay on the ground.’
As with so many others in the front-row union, McLoughlin and Carmichael became bosom buddies. Some of the friendships formed on his two Lions tours of 1971 and ’74 were less predictable.
‘You learn a lot about life on those tours,’ he says. ‘Both times I was looking forward to the trip, but a bit worried about some of these English people we had to talk to. Bob Hiller, I thought he was a stuffy-nosed bastard. John Spencer and David Duckham called themselves God One and God Two. Then I found out Hiller had the driest sense of humour of anyone I had ever met, Duckham was a gentleman and Spencer – well, Spencer was just mad. I remember sitting in my room with Duckham after the Canterbury game in ’71 and he said to me, “Sandy, we will just sit here and have a drink until whatever time you have to go out and meet the press, or whatever, and when you do go out I’ll be there with you.” He and I have become very close friends. We invited Duckham and his wife up to a do once: he thought it was a Lions reunion for ’71, but it was to commemorate Scotland beating England twice in a week. He took it all very well.’
Carmichael has needed all his courage and humour over the last few years. Three hip replacements and arthritis in an ankle necessitate the use of a stick to walk any distance. He is in pain most of the time: ‘It’s all right when I’m sat here talking to you, but it will start as soon as I stand up and start moving about.’ The spirit is undamaged, however, as he demonstrates by insisting on hobbling back up the two flights of stairs to his office at the Glasgow plant-hire firm where he works, to retrieve my notebook. He has also remained undiminished in other fields.
There is a son of 29 and a daughter of 26 from Sandy’s first marriage. But Alison, the second Mrs Carmichael, is expecting the couple’s second child in late 2000. Carmichael will be 56 then. Of his youngest son he says, wrily, ‘He’s only two, but I can’t catch him now.’
Alison, as Alison Brand, played as a prop in the first Scotland women’s international – against Ireland in February 1993 – thus prompting the ultimate pub quiz question: Name the two Scotland tight-heads who married each other.
4. DAVID LESLIE
It’s almost a decade since David Leslie made a tackle in anger, but the competitiveness that made him one of the most outstanding back-row forwards in the history of Scottish rugby and player of the Grand Slam year of 1984 by a considerable margin has never been subdued.
At his immaculate house in the seaside town of Broughty Ferry, a bare half-mile from his architect’s business close to the shore, there is a warm welcome from his wife, Pamela, and Dalmatian pup, Maverick. There is home-made soup and fresh salmon from Loch Fyne and an explanation: ‘When I heard you were coming to interview me for this book I was determined that my hospitality would be better than anyone else’s.’ Now that is undying competitiveness.
Pamela swears with a smile that the occasional nocturnal digs in the ribs are merely her husband reliving past Five Nations battles. The man himself admits, ‘It doesn’t go away very easily. I just wish I could still be doing it.’
Leslie’s often manic commitment to the Scotland cause is legendary. His pre-match psyching-up sessions and total disregard for his own safety during a match are still spoken of with awe . . . and, it must be said, the occasional smile. The descriptions of Leslie in his days in the maroon-and-white of Gala or the blue of Scotland invariably come couched in martial terms. He is always the ‘man who would be first over the top in the trenches’, or the ‘man you would pick to make a tackle for your life’. Roger Baird, the wing who played in the same Grand Slam-winning side of 1984 calls him ‘David Lloyd George Leslie’ and, asked to pencil in the first names in his imaginary Scotland all-star team, Jim Telfer names Andy Irvine first and David Leslie a close second – making a nonsense of a rumoured aversion to players who went to fee-paying schools.
Meeting Leslie for the first time, and seeing at first hand the occasional glimpses of that old intensity as he recalls distant battles, the words of Wellington in describing his troops at Waterloo spring instantly to mind: ‘I don’t know what effect these men will have on the enemy, but by God they frighten me.’
Leslie himself is conscious of all this. ‘I think, and I hope, it’s because they respect me,’ he says. ‘I know I used to get steamed up before a game, but I felt I had to mentally prepare myself. When they were introducing us to royalty before a game, I just wanted whoever it was to get lost so I could get on with it. I used these images to build up my confidence. Being Scottish and playing rugby is not easy. You have to make small resources go a long way. It was how you saw youself and how others and the opposition saw you. They all thought I was nuts going through this routine of imagining a pass, scoring a try or making a tackle – and then, of course, all the sports psychologists came in, asking players to do exactly the same thing, and they realised I wasn’t so daft after all.’
The springs of Leslie’s competitiveness can be traced to his upbringing in a family of two brothers and two sisters in Dundee: ‘We all fought for the last strawberry. None of us liked coming second. It was my brother Roger who introduced me to rugby. Roger is a much harder character than me. I certainly wouldn’t take him on in a square go.’
Educated at Dundee High School and Glenalmond – the establishment responsible for that other highly motivated Scotland player, David Sole, as well as John Frame and Rob Wainwright – Leslie qualified as an architect from Dundee University. It was while playing rugby for lowly Dundee HSFP that he caught the eye of the national selectors and the Scotland B coach Jim Telfer. Leslie’s speed to the breakdown, his aggression and fearsome rucking were the epitome of back-row play to Telfer. In 1975, against Ireland, Leslie became the first (and so far last) Scotland player to be capped from Division 4. His arrival in the Scotland set-up raised a few eyebrows. Some saw him as something of a public-school dandy and one international room-mate remembers arriving back to find Leslie in bed – with gloves on. Everyone’s perception changed, however, as soon as he pulled on a dark-blue jersey.