The coaching visionary Ray Williams, who would have been 90 last Sunday, was born into a year of coincidences in Wales.
He was not the only rugby-playing Ray Williams born in Wales in 1927. There was also the Llanelli wing who scored more than 200 tries and was capped three times in the 1950s. The two Rays also died in the same year, 2014, and for a while, the Scarlets wing's Wikipedia entry featured a picture of the coach.
Nineteen-twenty-seven was also the year when both Glyn Davieses, who played for Wales, were born. One was a prodigious outside-half from Pontypridd who played in the Victory Tests as a schoolboy and won 11 full caps, the other a late-developing flanker who sprang from, of all unlikely places, Southern English Counties, to win selection against the All Blacks in 1953, only to be injured the night before the match and wait two years for his one cap.
All three served Wales well. But none of them remotely matched the impact of their contemporary who did not play for Wales. Ray Williams' achievements as a coach would place him very high on any list of the people who made modern rugby.
At another time, he might have played for Wales. He played well enough for Northampton, where he is remembered as "an immaculate figure, with never a hair out of place" to be picked at outside-half for the Midlands against the 1953 All Blacks, and also for that year's final Welsh trial. Both, unhappily, were scheduled for Dec. 5. Williams opted for the trial but two weeks later, when Wales beat the All Blacks, he was playing on the wing for Northampton at Wasps. That he got as close as he did was a serious achievement.
Out of sight equated to out of mind for the mainstream of the Welsh game. As a northerner, born and raised in Wrexham, playing in England, but not for London Welsh, he was effectively hidden from selectorial sight. And this was a tough time even for the brightest stars at the big southern clubs. With Cliff Morgan a brilliant fixed point in what was then the No. 6 shirt for most of the 1950s, players as brilliant as Newport's Roy Burnett and Llanelli's Carwyn James were shut out as surely as less obvious contenders.
Williams was by profession a teacher, but by metier a coach -- his rugby intellect sharpened by years of study at Loughborough. At a time when thinking seriously about rugby, let alone actually coaching it, was regarded as the thin end of a potentially professional wedge by the game's authorities, Loughborough was the centre of its counterculture, with staff and alumni like him, Jeff Butterfield, John Robins and Jim Greenwood bringing a fresh analytical dimension to the game. That side of him found free rein from 1957 as a member of the technical staff of the Central Council of Physical Recreation. Discussion with thinkers like Butterfield helped develop his ideas, which, as Gerald Davies said, "brought together coaching ideas and physical preparation in a way which has never been done before."
That model formed the basis for a national coaching scheme which he proposed to the RFU. The union had unbent towards coaching to the extent, in 1952, of publishing its first coaching handbook, written by Humphrey Ellis, but was not yet prepared to go further. Its secretary, the 1930 Lions captain Doug Prentice, rejected Williams' proposal while pointing out that affiliated bodies were free agents. Ray found a more receptive audience in North Midlands, but a single small county union inevitably limited his impact.
England's loss would be Wales' gain. Welsh proponents of coaching seized on the implications of the 24-3 defeat by South Africa in 1964 to push for a rethink, and in particular for the appointment of a National Coaching Organiser. That battle was finally won when the WRU discovered that the Sports Council would at least part-fund the post.
Williams' credentials for becoming the world's first professional rugby union coach were unmatchable. His part-outsider status may this time have been an advantage -- while Welsh, he was not identified with any club or faction within the union. He had to take a pay cut, but the opportunity, not far off a nation-sized blank sheet on which to draw his coaching vision, was not one to miss.
"Shrewd, hardheaded and voluble", in the words of the Welsh Rugby Union's historians, and with an unmistakable quiff of silver hair, he hit the ground running, telling his first Annual General Meeting in 1967 that he was not ''naive enough to think that everyone in this room is 100 percent in favour of coaching. Part of my job will be to convince everyone that coaching is in the best interests of the game."
He had reckoned it might take five years to make a serious impact, but within a year reckoned that "the coaching body has been laid", and by 1971 said that Welsh rugby had been transformed. The vital work was done at grassroots level, developing a structure of coaching qualifications, conferences and publications which by the early 1970s had produced more than 300 qualified coaches and become a template for coaching schemes around the world.
At the same time, he made a vital contribution to a golden age for the Welsh national team. Compared to his grassroots efforts this was, in his words, "the tip of the iceberg", but he recognised the national team as an ideal shop window for the value of coaching. As a paid official, he was officially prohibited from any involvement with the national squad, but, as John Taylor has recalled, he was always there "in his red tracksuit and white polo neck, illegally helping on technical issues."
He formed a highly effective partnership with national coach Clive Rowlands. Both had the good fortune to coach an exceptionally talented group of players, but their complementary attributes -- Rowlands the motivator, with his invocations of Calon (heart), and Williams the pioneering analyst -- brought the best out of them.
He saw the game whole, likening the role of coach to that of an artist: "He does not begin by going to fill in little bits of detail. He begins by making a quick outline in chalk so that he can picture what the total project will look like." But that outline was then filled with detail about different elements in the game and their relationship to each other.
Australian coach Bob Templeton said that, "his system of isolating the different skills of the game was marvellous. It was a great way of teaching because so much could be done so quickly."
In 1967 he had published a paper on back-row play, arguing for its potential as an attacking rather than -- as had generally been the case in Britain -- a defensive force. He was fortunate that the unique skill set of Mervyn Davies at No. 8 could be combined with the speed and intelligence of John Taylor and Dai Morris on the flanks to make these aspirations flesh, but Merv the Swerve -- after initially mistaking Williams' North Walian tones for an English accent -- was similarly appreciative of the thinker, writing that he "knew more about rugby than anyone I had ever met" and that "when Ray opened his mouth, we listened."
Recognition came in other ways. The comedian Max Boyce cited 'Ray Williams coaching leaflets' in his version of Deck of Cards. There was the supreme compliment of imitation, the RFU appointing Don Rutherford to the post of Technical Administrator in 1969. Invariably supportive of Rutherford, Williams cheerfully signalled his recognition of the contrast between Welsh acceptance of coaching and the problems created for Rutherford by the RFU's continuing scepticism by beginning phone calls "Hello, this is God speaking."
One of nature's internationalists, Williams won a Churchill Travelling scholarship in 1970 and as the decade went on had an impact on other rugby nations -- notably Australia, which invited him to conduct a series of coaching workshops in 1974 following a defeat by Tonga. Cliff Jones, chair of the WRU's coaching committee, mused aloud that this might rebound on Wales when it toured Australia in 1978.
Payback, it might be argued, has lasted not four years but more than 40. Far too many of Australia's endless victories over Wales have been attributable to superiority in the imaginative, quick-thinking elements of the game in which Wales once excelled, and Williams advocated, for it to be a complete coincidence. And his impact on Australia has gone far beyond mere ability to beat Wales. Numerous Australian witnesses date the beginning their rise from also-ran to two-time World Cup winner to his visit -- ARU official John Freedman recalling that, "within four or five years we had turned the game around. His unqualified support enabled us to establish a national system."
And not only Australia. His book Rugby for Beginners informed the rise of mini-rugby, while it is probably easier to list the developing rugby nations where he did not coach. The one occasion on which I met him was at a European Shield match between Bridgend and Portugal at the Brewery Field. The extremely recognisable figure in the seat directly behind the press box explained that he had not long before done some coaching in Portugal, whose subsequent rise to the FIRA championship and qualification for the 2007 World Cup became from that moment much less surprising.
He was by then in retirement, after a long period in more conventional administration as secretary of the WRU from 1981 to 1988, tournament director for the 1991 Rugby World Cup and a member of the WRU Board and International Rugby Board.
All of these jobs were done well. But it was as a coach that he is remembered and was honoured, only a few weeks before his death in 2014, by the IRB's Vernon Pugh Award for distinguished service to the game. As Gerald Davies said, in presenting the award, "he was responsible for the way we think about rugby football."