JPR Williams, whose death at the age of 74 was announced Monday by his club Bridgend Ravens, redefined the role of the full-back in the 1970s to invent “total rugby” with the great Welsh generation that reigned then on the Five Nations Tournament. Lively and endowed with great athletic qualities, he breaks conventions and intercepts passes, plays with his feet, often out of time, to destabilize the opposing game. With him, the back, until then rather static, becomes capable of scoring tries.
Williams has the chance to be part of a Leek XV at the height of its glory. He is one of the eight Tournaments won by the Welsh between 1969 and 1979, including three Grand Slams in 1971, 1976 and 1978. His partners include players who have also become legendary: Gareth Edwards, Phil Bennett, Barry John and, at the end of his career, his namesake J.J. Williams. He was then identified by sports journalists only by his initials “JPR”.
Flamboyant on the pitch, he is also flamboyant in his physique. Huge sideburns reaching the corners of his lips, hair blowing in the wind, an alert and mischievous eye, this player who does not have the build of a mover (1.85 m, 75 kg) imposes his elegance. Even his corkscrew socks become a genre. “The rugby world has lost one of its greatest players of all time, a man who revolutionized the fullback position during a twelve-year international career that included 55 caps for Wales and eight for the British
However, it was not rugby that John Peter Rhys Williams favored in his youth but tennis. Born in Bridgend, 40 kilometers west of Cardiff, in a family where the oval still holds a large place, it was on the courts that he achieved his first success. Both doctors, his parents intended him to follow in their footsteps but his father, a great fan of the oval ball, also made JPR and his three brothers play rugby on the family tennis court.
Rather than choosing between one or the other, the young boy pursues both. Wales’ junior tennis champion, he was also selected to play rugby with the national under-fifteen team. The oval only definitively took over with his selection at 19 for the Welsh B team’s tour to Argentina. Before he turned twenty, he obtained his first international cap in the Five Nations Tournament against Scotland in 1969 at Murrayfield, with a victory to boot.
Despite his success in rugby, he never lost sight of his medical career. From 1977, he reduced the time devoted to sport to pass his final exams as an orthopedic surgeon. “I usually say that I spent half my life breaking my bones on rugby fields and the other half putting other people’s bones back together in the operating room,” he will say. he in his biography published in 2007.
He definitively bowed out of the national team in 1981 but continued to play until 2003, notably for Tondu RFC in the small town of Aberkenfig, not far from his hometown. He will finally be able to play winger, his favorite position, even if he is celebrated as one of the best fullbacks in the history of the game. He then plays cricket at regional level and becomes president of the Bridgend rugby club. Ravens.
“He was the rock of the defenses of every team he played for, the inspiration of counter-attacks and the man who feared nothing and who believed that a cause was never lost,” said continued Terry Cobner. “We all thought,” added the Welsh rugby boss, “that he was ‘Mister Indestructible’.”
