After a lifetime playing, watching and writing about the game, Michael Blair hands over the mantle of Birmingham Post Rugby Correspondent to Brian Dick - a younger man for a sport that has moved into a new era. Here Blair bids adieu to the game he loved...
It had been a long, tiring journey: from Hamburg in the north of Germany to the southern outskirts of Cologne and now I stood in the queue in the NAAFI at Royal Air Force Station Butzweilerhof requesting a plate of sausage and chips.
Two airmen stood behind me, heard me order and when I sat down, they came across.
"Welsh, arn'ew," said one of them.
Yes, I replied.
"Right," said the one with the crew cut, "you're playin' Saturday."
Oh! said I.
And the next morning they came up to me in the mess and asked: "what position do you play?"
Centre-forward, I said. They looked at me as though I was from another planet. One of the press gangsters was from Bridgend, the other was from Blaenavon and they genuinely did not understand that there were young men in Wales who played games with balls that were other than ovoid.
As a matter of fact, in the large area above East, South and West Wales, rugby was a foreign sport. Soccer was the game of most of the country and especially my part of it: Aberystwyth, a town of fish and chips and football critics.
My father played for the town team, I played in the Welsh League at the age of 15 and I have a brother who went on to win 13 amateur caps. That's a pretty deep soccer pedigree and hard to walk away from.
"But we've only got about twelve rugby players on the station and we're playing the Welsh Guards this week," pleaded the man from Bridgend.
"Carn'ew give it a go?"
Actually, there were only two rugby players on the station - these two. The rest were jokers and drunks who, after long enough at the NAAFI bar, would agree to anything. And we were due to play the Third Battalion of the Welsh Guards, the champions of the entire British Army.
And they stuck me in the centre, there to mark Bleddyn Williams's younger brother, Vaughan.
A massacre, of course. 55-nil. In old money.
Never saw Williams in the first half. Woosh! He'd gone. But then I tackled him and tackled him again, I got a bit of a hang of some of the secrets of all-out defence and, by the final whistle, to my amazement, I was enjoying it all.
After an hour in the bar and after all the singing and experiencing a depth of bonhomie that I had never known in my life before, I was ecstatic.
Which was how I came to fall in love with rugby football. Most rugby men of my acquaintance were conditioned to play; indoctrinated you might say. They played at school and, usually, they were properly taught.
I found rugby by accident and my crash course was an afternoon against the brother of the greatest centre who ever lived. But I stayed with the game, adoring it the more every week hammered though RAF Butzweilerhof invariably were.
I spent my two years National Service doing little more than playing rugby and cricket and they practically had to kick me out at the end.
I arrived home to discover that there was now a rugby club in Aberystwyth (still the most eccentric collection I have ever known; one of the props, used to swallow a tin of Vaseline before kick-off to ward off internal bruising) and I graduated from there to a club of slightly greater fame.
At which point my rugby abruptly ended because I was a young reporter on a now-defunct newspaper who required me to work on Saturdays, thereby planting in my thoughts an irony that persisted for the remainder of my working days. I gave up rugby for journalism. Now we have rugby players who, when they've finished their fun, become instant journalists.
One or two, I might generously add, quite successfully.
Eventually, having previously been a "proper" journalist covering courts and councils and things, I fetched up in Birmingham in that section of this newspaper that some might refer to as the toy department - the sports desk.
Three years later, 41 years ago, they asked me to write the rugby and that, until this week, is what I have been doing ever since.
To say that it has been an experience is to put it mildly.
There was an austere chapel element about rugby in West Wales; nil-nil and 3-3- draws, which were common results, were pretty earnest affairs and there was a lot of hymn singing afterwards.
Midlands rugby was an entirely different culture. The rugby, as played by Coventry and, later, Moseley was exceptional; apres rugby was stupefying - it was where the Bacchanalians must have got their ideas from. And de Sade.
I never will tell some of the tales of which I know. I will, though, tell of the Easter tour I went on to Tenby with the Old Veseyans.
Five minutes before kick-off against Narbeth seconds the V's discovered that they were a man short and as I was the least inebriated fool on the touchline, I was prevailed upon to prove my sportsmanship and my manhood and play.
Guess where? In the front row and I will tell you now that there is nothing in the whole of sport more desperate than for an averagely cowardly wing-threequarter like me to find himself in this hellish dungeon.
The whistle blew for the first scrum and suddenly I was face to face with a toothless, unshaven troglodyte who played rugby for one purpose: to inflict pain.
Came the engagement, my neck seemed to snap, then my spine, in three places, and I my reaction was vocally appropriate to my suffering. Whereupon the beast opposite snarled to his mates: "Boys, we've got a f ******* squealer yer."
A shrewd squealer, though, I thought. I charged through the first line-out, assaulted their scrum-half in full view of the referee and do you know how he punished me? He refused to send me off.
Then there was the trip to Twickenham with Old Edwardians. We were going to watch Warwickshire in the County Championship final and stopped off to play London Hospital on the way. The seconds were short, of course, and there was muggins standing on the wing in borrowed size-seven hockey shoes. My toes are still bent.
Came the last minute, Eds were losing and a desperate mid-field conference was called. "Mike," said the captain, "this next move: youre not in." As I hadn't been in any of the others, either, I was not disappointed.
Apart from the occasional appearance in somebody's President's side and one hilarious game for the Birmingham Post XV (the borrowed jerseys had been badly washed, had spectacularly shrunk and we all ran out in midnight blue boleros) that was my last game.
Spectatorhood thereafter was a constant pleasure. Long, long before rugby became the salesman's paradise it's supposed to be today I saw some wonderful matches: all the Cov/Moseley clashes; Staffordshire, having just secceded from North Midlands, beating Gloucestershire in the County Championship at Burton; North Mids, after trying for centuries, finally beating Lancashire at The Reddings; Midlands (West) stuffing the All Blacks at Moseley; Llanelli beating them on the same tour and, of course, the Barbarians...
I recall with special fondness just one game from the New Era: Coventry's epic victory over a Newcastle side that had cost trillions in the Cup at Coundon Road. A gigantic win and a signal of the way the game was going to go.
Within 30 minutes of the whistle, Newcastle were on their way home. The rugby that I fell in love with has perished and, no, this is not going to be another rant against professionalism and all its ills: even I appreciate that the game has to move on.
But I will take exception to all those who, in their desperate urge to hype up what it is we watch today, suggest that there was something wrong, something inferior, about the rugby that I saw that made the game the greatest yet invented.
Rugby owes its name and its fame to its past, its present is a mess (how can we corrupt, as we did in New Zealand this summer, an institution like the British Lions?) and its future is uncertain.
It is my view that rugby is in an injured state (have you been reading the squabbling that's been going on these past weeks, before the season has even started?) not because it went professional but because of the way it went professional.
Ten years and one week ago in a hotel room in Paris there was a knee-jerk decision taken by IRB representatives, without mandate from their Unions, as I recall, to ditch an ancient culture and that's when a plague of new problems began.
Perhaps professionalism was inevitable. Bad professionalism was not.
Had the game's rulers sat down to devise a sensible formula for professionalism then rugby would have been spared the terrible straits it suddenly found itself in.
They didn't. They said "let's turn pro and then find a system." And how irresponsible was that? Twenty-four hours later the entrepreneurs had moved in and the game did not know - still does not know - what hit it.
True, lots of people turn up to watch Leicester these days, and Bath and the Wasps and, of course, there was England's World Cup.
But there are vast levels of rugby, untouched by all this glitz, where a little more help from above would be appreciated.
English rugby, generally, sacrified a lot for that World Cup. The winning of it is supposed to signify that rugby is a better game today than it was. It isn't. It's just different and good luck to all those who don't mind the difference. But I was around for the arrival of Gerald Davies (I used to catch the train to Loughborough to watch him every Wednesday), of Michael Gibson, of David Duckham and Gareth Edwards.
And I watched quite a few in the pack who might have disputed the modern concept of Martin Johnson, fine forward that he was, as the greatest of all Enforcers. Somebody is going to have to try very hard to convince me that we produce superior footballers today. Bigger ones, no doubt. And fitter. And a heck of a lot richer.
For me, alas, there has been too much change that has been made with too much haste. Rugby never did need much improving and I'll say farewell with this final thought.
Why would anyone want to mess with Mozart?
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