Why Welsh rugby wizard JPR Williams was the last of the great amateur sporting heroes

The swashbuckling full-back who died this week was the ultimate Corinthian: fully committed and passionate, yet playing for nothing more than the fun of it. Jim White pays tribute to a sporting great who spent his working days as an orthapaedic surgeon trying to mend bones, and his Saturday afternoons on the pitch trying to break them

JPR Williams after playing his last international game, salutes fans from the stands of Cardiff Arms Park, 1979. The final score was Wales 27 England 3 (Colorsport/Shutterstock)

When JPR Williams, the great Welsh rugby full-back, died this week at the age of 74, the tales were legion. What a player he was: quick, smart, tactically astute. Not to forget, astonishingly brave. He appeared to have no fear in the bruising, bloodied environment of rugby in the 1970s.

In truth, often he would get his revenge in first. As on the 1974 British and Irish Lions tour of South Africa when, in order to pre-empt the home side’s bullying aggression, the visitors agreed that on the call of 99 they would go into collective action. The idea was, on the basis that the referee could not send the entire team off, as soon as they heard the shout, everyone would simultaneously punch the nearest Springbok.

Phil Bennett, the side’s cultured fly-half, recalls that in the midst of one of the test matches in that notorious tour, he saw Williams suddenly charge 30 yards across the pitch to flatten the biggest bloke in a green shirt with a single blow. As he trotted back into position, Williams said to Bennett “That showed him.” To which Bennett replied, “But John, nobody shouted anything.”