MR TELFER COMES TO TOWN
IT WAS EARLY IN THE 1990s, with Scottish rugby on the crest of a wave, and I was sitting in the reception area at Murray-field Stadium, waiting for an interview with the inimitable James Telfer, Esquire. Suddenly, as the clock ticked towards the appointed hour, a well-known internationalist caught sight of me and inquired on whom I was waiting. When I told him, he winced, turned a peculiar puce colour, and declared, prior to making a sharp exit: ‘Well, I hope you’ve got a sturdy book to shove down your trousers!’
It might be unfair to describe that as a common reaction from those who played under Telfer, but there is little doubt that the Borderer possesses the ability to induce trepidation and fear among his charges and has resorted to expletive-laden tirades whenever he has divined it will provide the necessary verbal boot up the backside. One such memorable outburst arrived in the build-up to the British and Irish Lions tackling the Springboks on their 1997 tour of the Republic when – or so one of the Irish players told me – his rage was so all-consuming that several of his team were genuinely concerned that he might conk out with a heart attack towards the end of his Malcolm Tucker-like diatribe.
That is Telfer in a nutshell: forever passionate, stubbornly non-conformist in his socialist tenets, amid a sport which is still, rightly or wrongly, perceived as being the preserve of private schools and the affluent middle classes, and robustly committed to ensuring that nobody on his watch ever entertains a sliver of complacency. Little has changed in his dedication to education since he came into the world in 1940 and worked as a shepherd’s boy on the Cheviot Hills. From the beginning, Telfer was an outsider, a man whose parents, Willie and Peggy, were barely interested in rugby, but who quickly recognised that their son was too bright to be consigned to some menial job and eventually packed him off to become a teacher. In these circumstances, it appears even more amazing that he subsequently became one of the most important figures in the history of the Scottish game, and celebrated his 44th and 50th birthdays on the same days that his country won their only Grand Slams of the modern era. And yet, he was moulded by the Borders, grew addicted to mentoring and schooling youngsters, and, whether in his suit and tie in Hawick, or with his tracksuit on in Melrose, there are literally thousands of children who have grown up with a passion for knowledge which they learned from Jim Telfer.
Many people have attempted to fathom what makes him tick. Allan Massie provided a good thumbnail sketch with the assessment: ‘Telfer is a man of innate authority. There’s a wealth of quiet reserve and self-knowledge, touched by that form of self-mockery, which appears as understatement, in the way he will describe himself as a dominant personality.’ Bill McLaren, speaking in 2003, responded thus: ‘Jim has never forgotten where he came from, he is one of the most honest men you could ever hope to meet, and he is also somebody with an endless thirst for learning and hard work.’ That much was obvious even during my brief visit to his office inside Murrayfield, where he was carrying out endless video scrutiny, examining the weaknesses of opponents, drawing up a raft of new tactical formations, and generally confirming that he is, and always has been, an advocate of the mantra that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
At the outset, his interest in rugby originated from him growing up in an area where it was the number one pastime. Indeed, it is not particularly difficult to envisage that if Telfer had been born in Glasgow, he might have developed into an Alex Ferguson figure in football coaching. Yet there was something else in his make-up, which he later admitted had motivated and spurred him on to pursue fresh challenges, and that was his own sense of inferiority. It sounds absurd, given his glittering CV, but he constantly felt the need to prove himself and that was one of the reasons behind his inspirational performances in a Scotland jersey and further explained why he hated slackers on the rugby circuit.
My upbringing was one where there were no privileges: you had to work for everything you got. I was not born into a family with money, so I had to earn everything. I took that into my rugby and my teaching, probably in the way I would choose to develop someone, no matter what his background was: he was judged by me, only on his ability and his attitude. I would always do my best to encourage the trier; the boy, who maybe wasn’t the most talented, but the one who showed lots of commitment and worked as hard as he possibly could to improve himself. I came from a non-rugby family, and I had to start from scratch, so I have never had that much time for people who think that they are better than they really are, either in rugby, or in education, or in life. The players who always had excuses for not training could disappear as far as I was concerned.
When I was making my way, I developed a huge fear of failure that was always with me. It drove me on as a player and it drove me on as a coach. I had, and still have, an inferiority complex. Coming from the background that I did, I suppose that it was inevitable. Being raised in an environment where the landlord and the duke were the kingpins made me feel small, despite me railing against the system. It also made me a bit of a rebel, to be honest with you. I saw that you were being judged on what you owned, rather than what you are, and I didn’t like it. No, I didn’t like it one little bit.
What Telfer did relish was wholehearted endeavour, physical self-sacrifice in a sporting cause, an appetite for hard graft, and the recognition that the team mattered more than any single individual. There is a photograph of the young Telfer, standing along with his Melrose comrades, at the climax of their double-winning success in the 1962–63 campaign. The majority of the players in the picture are smiling, as they were entitled to do, following a harsh and protracted winter during which they had clung on to Hawick’s coat-tails in the early stages, as the prelude to stalling the Green Machine 5–0 in a classic encounter at the Greenyards, which was watched by more than 4,000 supporters. Yet Telfer’s expression is unflinching, with even a trace of defiance, as if delivering the message: ‘See that trophy sitting in front of us. We won it. We deserved to win it. And we’ll win it again next year if it’s anything to do with me.’
That attitude became a familiar one during the next four decades, whether Telfer was excelling in the No 8 berth for his club or country, or exhorting and encouraging a string of teams, both in Scotland and with assorted Lions ensembles in New Zealand and South Africa, to aspire to ever loftier standards. This perfectionism made him one of the best of his generation; and he performed with distinction for Scotland, after making his debut in the Five Nations Championship against France in 1964 at Murrayfield, where the hosts won 10–0, as the prelude to earning his next cap in the no-scoring draw with the All Blacks at the same venue. To this day, the Scots have never beaten New Zealand, but when Telfer started talking to the men from the Land of the Long White Cloud on their visit to the northern hemisphere, he developed a comradeship with them which shaped his whole rugby philosophy, both on and off the pitch, for better and for worse.
He ventured to New Zealand with the Lions in 1966 and with Scotland a year later, and his initial passion turned into a full-blown love affair. I once asked Telfer why he laid such great store by their methods and his reply was typically to the point. ‘You don’t get into their team because of who you are, or where you went to school, or because you have been given an easy passage up the ladder. You get to wear the All Black jersey because you have earned the right to wear it and their whole rugby structure, from primary school right up to the provinces, is based on giving every single youngster in their country an equal opportunity,’ said Telfer, who hardly needed to mention the stark contrast between this situation and the prevailing climate in Scotland in the early 1990s. ‘In Scotland, we don’t really seem to like team sports that much. We produce individuals who are good at golf and athletics, boxing and swimming. But when it comes to team sport, far too much effort is devoted to football, and we’re not even any good at it.’
These trenchant opinions meant that Telfer could never have considered an alternative career in the diplomatic corps. Not that keeping his head down and trotting out party lines ever held any appeal for him. Instead, he thrived on his own obdurate terms, initially as an attacking player with plenty of pace and acceleration, then, as the wear and tear from injuries stacked up, through his ability to focus on mastering and refining new skills. As a player, he was one of life’s natural leaders, forever cajoling and coaxing those around him, and even when his speed started to fade, little by little, he amply compensated with powerful running, canny positional sense, an abrasive determination to burst through a brick wall if it was required, and the knack for transforming contests by the sheer force of his personality and the savvy to be in the right place at the right time. These ingredients added up to one seriously formidable player and although he only gained 25 Scotland caps, he would almost certainly have secured more but for a number of injuries, which restricted his Scotland career to the years between 1964 and 1970. Telfer’s indefatigable sense of commitment reached the stage where he instinctively dived into the fray where other, less courageous, souls would have ducked for cover and he showed no fear against some of the most imposing opponents in the game, such as the famous occasion when he pounced to score the match-winning try against France in Colombes in 1969. This, of course, was screened repeatedly for the next 26 years until the Scots, inspired by Gregor Townsend and Gavin Hastings, triumphed in Paris in 1995 on their final visit to the Parc des Princes, with Telfer in attendance and, as he put it, bloody glad that he would not have to sit through any more viewings of his effort in black and white.
Raw-boned and steely-eyed, with nary a hint of fat in his body, Telfer was as fit as a fiddle and was as uncompromisingly tough on himself, if he detected his standards slipping even a fraction, as he ever was on anybody else in his teams. Perhaps we should not strive to build him up into some sort of Borders Superman, but there again, similarities existed between the comic-book hero from Smallville and his Scottish counterpart from a diminutive region. By day, in his workplace, Telfer was always the bookish chemistry teacher, lean of build and studiously disinclined to flaunt his fame, preferring to keep a low profile and concentrating wholly on teaching his pupils without any distractions or sideshows. It was only when he entered the realm of rugby that his personality changed and his rivals glanced around for any spare bits of kryptonite.
In terms of his contribution to Melrose, Telfer captained the Greenyards club for six seasons and, despite the marauding qualities of his Hawick and Gala rivals of the period, his contributions were as immense as they were consistent, and proved the catalyst for his team’s hard-fought Border League success in the 1970–71 season. Yet, in some respects, with Telfer by then in his thirties and no longer in international contention, his thoughts were already turning to how he could influence and assist his country on the wider stage. His visits to New Zealand had convinced him that there was no point in Scotland stumbling along from one miserable sequence of results to another – and, after a promising start with a brace of victories over England in the space of a week in 1971, the decade was a wretched one for the SRU’s teams – and therefore, he turned his attention and scrutiny to learning from the Kiwi template and transporting it to the Scottish game. This, of course, was far from easy, not least because Murrayfield’s officials were slow to recognise the value of appointing a full-time coach, allied to the fact that, whereas rugby was the number one sport in New Zealand and thus commanded all the attention from school upwards to the regional structure and All Black enclave, football was the kingpin in Scotland, a state of affairs which only increased as the national team began qualifying for the first stages of World Cup tournaments.
In short, Telfer faced an obstacle course, which was strewn with hazards, and it was not until 1980 that he was finally presented with the opportunity to try and improve matters in his homeland when he took over from Nairn MacEwan, who had produced some entertaining teams, but generally without the forward strength and technical expertise to convert promising positions into regular victories. Telfer knew, even before he accepted the national coaching role, that he would have to implement a dramatic change in the fitness, the mindset and the physicality of future internationalists and none of this was ever going to be accomplished in a month, or even a year. Yet, if there was one feature of Telfer’s personality which had earned the respect and admiration of even those who quibbled with his methods, it was the fellow’s thirst for knowledge and learning, to the extent where he was capable of soaking up information like blotting paper and, once it had been stored in his brain, it was never forgotten. As Sherlock Holmes remarked of his brother, Mycroft: ‘His specialism is omniscience.’ This meant that when Telfer sat down to pick his squads and addressed the various issues of which players were best suited to every position and how he could bolster competition for places, nothing was ever left to chance, as Colin Deans, one of the men who thrived under his guidance, told me.
Jim was the sort of guy who got to know you first, who took the time to find out what made you tick, before he fathomed how he could inspire you from there and he was brilliant at man-management and persuading players to push themselves to the limit. I remember going on a 1980 development tour to France and we were beaten in our first game, with the forwards not doing themselves justice, and Jim went through us like a dose of salts and the next ten days were probably the hardest of my rugby life.
Later on the trip, we came up against a French Barbarians side, which comprised the players who had won the 1975 Grand Slam for France, and Jim knew that it was going to be a really tough contest. So he started winding up one of our lads, George Mackie – who was a nice big lad from Inverness, who didn’t have a malicious bone in his body – and by the time Jim was finished, George was flinging punches at him in the changing room. It was totally out of character for him, because he was one of life’s gentle giants, but Jim had obviously decided he needed battlers against the French and by the time George walked out on to the field, he was fighting mad and really up for the challenge.
As for Jim, he just rolled with the punches and seemed happy at the reaction he had provoked, which tells you a lot about the qualities which he brought to the job. He knew how to push people, and I suppose there was something reminiscent of Alex Ferguson about the way he was always searching for new standards and bringing the guys closer together. In any sporting side, you have different characters, different personalities, and one of the hardest tasks is getting everybody to pull in the same direction, especially in rugby, where you can have one or two world-class players in your ranks, but that isn’t much use if you’re not performing as a team. But Jim knew what buttons to press, he would push you, punish you, and you could liken his methods to SAS training: in that only the very best would succeed when they were put to the test. Personally, I’ve got a hell of a lot to thank him for, because he taught me that you never know how far you can go until you have been tested and he definitely drove Scottish rugby in the right direction, because he knew that we couldn’t continue with just hoping things would turn up. If that meant sending us to hell and back, training in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, he soon found out which of the guys were ready for international rugby and which weren’t going to make it. And it is called ‘Test’ rugby for a reason.
Nonetheless, it should not be forgotten that MacEwan had carried out some sterling work of his own in the Scotland cause, despite the largely disappointing results for his XVs in the seventies. As a consequence, Telfer was able to concentrate on improving his forwards, with backs of the calibre of Andy Irvine, Jim Renwick, Keith Robertson, Roy Laidlaw and the peerless John Rutherford perfectly capable of capitalising on any decent stream of possession from their pack. Yet it was not simply the case that Telfer continually shouted and screamed blue murder at his charges: any loudmouth could have done that and relied on invective at the expense of innovation. Instead, he gradually revolutionised the manner in which the sport was organised in Scotland, both by enhancing the fitness and durability of his troops and bringing his admiration for the New Zealand game to bear on .his personnel at Murrayfield, as well as relying far less on Exiles than past generations. He was also fortunate that the national leagues, which came into existence in 1973–74, were responsible for raising the standard of club rugby in his homeland, even if they began to overshadow the Border League, just as the South’s leading organisations had feared would happen. (This explained their opposition to the scheme.) In which light, and although there were no quick fixes, the Scots, slowly but surely, started to produce displays which proved they had exorcised the travails of the previous decade.
Alan Tomes, the formidable 48-cap-winning lock forward for his country and a staple of the Green Machine in the 1970s and 1980s, offered some telling points when we discussed the contrast between Jim Telfer and his Hawick confrère, Derrick Grant.
Jim and Derrick were totally different characters. I worked under Derrick at Mansfield Park and I thought he was a great 15-a-side coach, whereas Jim was more fixated with forward play and getting his pack working as he wanted. Don’t get me wrong, we all benefited from Jim’s efforts, but he was absolutely ruthless, he challenged you as a player and as a person, and if you didn’t measure up, the bottom line was that you wouldn’t stay in the picture.
He needed to be like that to get the best out of his players, but it’s only natural that I have such a high regard for Derrick, because I worked with him week in, week out at Hawick, and when you are that close to somebody, you form a bond with them and you have to bear in mind how absolutely devoted Derrick was to keeping his club great. By the late 1970s, the rest of us had cars and we would drive down to the ground in the middle of winter, but Derrick came on his bike, whatever the weather was like, and I don’t think that he has been given the recognition he deserves, and the same applies to Nairn MacEwan for that matter. After all, Jim already had the backs to do damage when he got the job; so he just had to get the forwards sorted out. Yes, he succeeded in that aim, and he was a terrific coach, but let’s not forget that Scottish rugby didn’t start and finish with him. There were others who did a smashing job as well and when you look at the number of Hawick players who won international recognition for Scotland during that period, it seems clear to me that Derrick made a huge contribution to the process.
This appears a prescient assessment and Tomes was one of the proudest and most industrious of the myriad characters who served both Grant and Telfer to the best of his abilities. But, all the same, the latter’s arrival as national coach sparked a resurgence which led all the way to the 1984 Grand Slam success and, as soon as he stepped down the following season, the Scots had plummeted back to earth in collecting the wooden spoon. This cannot be coincidence. Better, surely, to regard the Melrose mentor as the fulcrum of a new inner conviction within his compatriots, which ensured they no longer feared anybody.
That much was evident as the 1980s rolled on. In 1981, the Welsh and the Irish were defeated at Murrayfield, with the invariably daunting away trips to Paris and London yielding narrow 16–9 and 23–17 losses. That was the prelude to Telfer stiffening the sinews of his charges with a hastily-arranged visit to the southern hemisphere and another clash with that All Black magic. ‘It wasn’t on the schedule originally, because South Africa had been due to go to New Zealand for 12 weeks, but the authorities cut it to six, following all the [anti-apartheid] protests,’ recalled Deans, who was one of the cornerstones of Telfer’s grand design. ‘So it was a late booking and Jim and the SRU were both delighted. These kinds of tours really helped Scotland develop and brought us closer together and I have no doubt they sowed the seeds of our future success.’
On a positive note, the experience demonstrated to the visitors that they had no reason to harbour inferiority complexes when sparring with the All Blacks and they provided their opponents with a stern challenge in the first Test in Dunedin before succumbing 11–4. Unfortunately, this outcome had the negative effect of convincing Telfer that what his men required was a diet of ever more gruelling training sessions and they were driven relentlessly in the build-up to the second Test in Auckland, which ended in a 40–15 defeat. This was not the first occasion, and it would not be the last, when Telfer’s teams were pushed through the wringer, to the stage where the forwards were virtually dead on their feet from the rigours of their training-ground exertions, by the time the match, for which they had been preparing, kicked off. Ultimately, it proved that even the best coaches made mistakes, or asked for too much, but the refreshing aspect of the whole experience was the strength in depth of the home-grown Scots who were emerging.
They included players of the lustre of the Watsonians centre, David Johnston, a fellow blessed with genuine pace in the midfield; the mercurial Roger Baird, a livewire winger who created opportunities for others, even though he is probably destined to go down in posterity as the man who never scored a try for Scotland; and Keith Robertson, the nuggety Melrose winger, who was part of an increasing number of Borderers who were forcing their way into the international mix. This had nothing to do with favouritism – as Deans told me: ‘Jim always picked his guys on merit and it was irrelevant to him whether they came from Glasgow, Edinburgh, the Highlands or Hawick’ – but simply reflected the fact that the South was, once again, punching above its weight in Scottish rugby.
The success of and razor-sharp rivalry between Hawick and Gala had grown in intensity once more, with the Maroons shedding their ‘nearly men’ mantle and they not only secured back-to-back Scottish championship titles in 1980 and 1981, but also recorded their first brace of victories over the Green Machine in the same season for nearly 30 years. Telfer scrutinised these matches with more than his usual interest, because they featured a veritable plethora of past, present and future internationalists and whether admiring the leadership qualities of the Gala skipper, Jim Aitken – who had already proved his worth with Scotland since making his Test debut in 1977 – or poring over the talents of such rising stars as Derek White, Alastair Campbell, Peter Dods and Derek Turnbull, Telfer knew that there was sufficient potential for the Scots to transcend their long-time inconsistency and show the rest of the world they could win on the big stage.
Better still, there was a fresh air of confidence among the players who had recently started strutting their stuff for Scotland, including Keith Robertson, who had earned his first cap against the All Blacks in 1978 and, despite finishing on the wrong end of an 18–9 defeat, viewed these encounters as the reason why he was involved in rugby, the more so because he had prospered under Telfer’s tutelage and recognised a kindred spirit.
In the early days at Melrose, we didn’t have a big pack, so we had to take risks. People at the club tended not to get after me too much for doing that, because they trusted my instincts. Creamy [the nickname for Jim Telfer] eventually did mind when we started gaining a bit of control up front, but he understood that we had to take the fight to the opposition. And, to be honest, I was happiest when I was doing that. It comes from a feel, knowing what’s round about you and how to use the ball. A lot depends on the situations you find yourself in. Sometimes risks come off, more often than not, they don’t.
But even though it might sound strange, I found it quite easy playing international rugby. There was very little immediate pressure as a winger, compared with turning out at centre [for Melrose] week in, week out. Also, I came into a side which was struggling, and we only gained the occasional chance to work with the ball, so we had to try things when we did get it. And when Jim took over as coach, he already knew what I could do. He rammed the message into us that we had to show greater control, because there was no point flinging the ball around like headless chickens and scoring an occasional great try if we were gifting chances to the opposition and conceding three or four at our end. It sounds simple now, but he had a way of conveying these things which made sure you never forgot them. And, bit by bit, the results came along to back him up.
This was true, but any signs of progress were invariably followed by a reality check. The Scots, for instance, achieved a creditable 24–15 victory over the Australians in Edinburgh towards the end of 1981, and approached the following year’s Five Nations event with a justified amount of confidence, only to commence their campaign with a dull-as-ditchwater 9–9 draw with the English on a frozen afternoon in Auld Reekie. Telfer’s pursed lips on the periphery testified to his frustration, although there was little difference between his reaction to his side’s lacklustre performance during their 21–12 loss in Dublin and their 16–7 win against France at Murrayfield. In both matches, chances were squandered, and legends such as Renwick and Irvine, the latter in his final international season, were culpable during the defeat to Ireland, who claimed their first Triple Crown since 1949. At this point, it was, at best, a B-minus for their championship display.
Yet, at least from Telfer’s perspective, there were signs of improvement. Not so many that he was prepared to express public optimism about the trip to Cardiff – a city where the Scots had not tasted triumph for 20 years – but sufficient to instill a quiet expectation in his troops. For starters, the Welsh had slipped a notch or two from the majestic force they had been in the 1970s. And secondly, Telfer reckoned that his pack could get into their opponents’ faces and run them off their feet if they played to their potential.
As it transpired, they fared better than anybody could have anticipated, first weathering an early onslaught, and then cranking up the momentum with such a wondrous exhibition of pace and continuity that they might have been asked to do the haka at the climax. Jim Calder rounded off one electrifying incision from Baird and Iain Paxton. Then David Johnston produced another glimpse of magic with a sublime outside break which left the Welsh cover tackling fresh air. Generally, with Rutherford at his scintillating best, it was a masterful exhibition and while some people in the Valleys proclaim that you never actually beat the Welsh, you just score more points than them, there was no arguing with this display or with the eventual winning margin of 34–18, which was a trouncing in anybody’s terms.
This was Telfer at his best, acting as the catalyst for improbable heroics, allowing his team the chance to express themselves, and the normally reticent Renwick was one of the men who viewed this contest as a stepping stone on the subsequent glory trail.
The tactics were to wait and be patient for the chance to counter-attack, the chance to go from wherever, and when it came to just go for it. We had a few guys who had been on the British Lions tour [of South Africa] in 1980, we had all been to New Zealand as a squad, and Jim Telfer had come in and started to work with the forwards. We had beaten both Romania and Australia before the Five Nations. We had beaten France before going to Cardiff and Terry Holmes and Jeff Squires cried off for Wales, so they brought in a boy for his first cap at scrum-half, and old Clive Burgess came back into their back row. All these different things helped lift our confidence that day. We knew we could beat them at home and a lot of us were pretty desperate to do it away by then. We kept it pretty simple, but we were ready for the counter-attacking chances which came our way and we had boys who were able to finish them off when it mattered. So, looking back, it was off the cuff. But it was also planned. That sounds daft, doesn’t it!
As if that was not reason enough for cheer, the Scots next embarked on a sojourn Down Under, in the summer of ’82, and duly gained a memorable triumph over the Australians. It is the only time they have beaten any of the southern hemisphere ‘big three’ away from home in their history, even if they had to perform out of their skins to emerge with a 12–7 win at Ballymore in Brisbane. It seemed as if Telfer, the master strategist, assisted by his growing coterie of Borders foot soldiers, was guiding his country towards previously unscaled peaks. Yet, as always when dealing with Scotland, it pays to be pragmatic and the elation from that first Test success had barely abated before the tourists were being overrun 33–9 in the rematch in Sydney. Once again, Telfer had drilled his forwards into the dirt, and once again, they had nothing left to offer when the Wallabies rushed in their direction, scenting blood and revenge. This was in danger of becoming a familiar story, but what ensued in the 1983 Five Nations deviated from the script altogether.
In fact, 1983 turned into Telfer’s annus horribilis. At the outset, in what was the third season of his four-year tenure, he must have imagined that his team would have a decent opportunity of challenging for the championship, as the prelude to him leading the British and Irish Lions to New Zealand in the summer. But any coach, even one as skilled and multifaceted as Telfer, can only control so many factors and juggle so many balls before the whole edifice comes crashing down on top of him. He was slated for taking a year out to prepare for the Lions crusade – while Derrick Grant and Colin Telfer stepped in as temporary replacements – then found himself repeatedly outvoted by the Irish duo of the captain, Ciaran Fitzgerald, and the tour manager, Willie John McBride. As the barbs and criticisms stacked up, the Kiwis rubbed their opponents’ noses in the dirt, en route to a ‘Blackwash’ and some scathing comments from the non-Scottish press about Telfer’s alleged tactical deficiencies. As a proud Borderer, albeit one who had grown up with a self-confessed inferiority complex, this was a bitter pill to swallow and Jim was typically honest in discussing the mental scars which afflicted him in his autobiography, Looking Back for Once.
No amount of reasoning could lift my personal feelings of failure. My overriding thought when that tour finished was that I had believed I was ready to be a Lions coach, but that the tour had shown me I wasn’t. I failed to find a game that would beat the All Blacks, who were always better than us, technically and tactically. People asked me at the end of the tour whether I feared facing the Scottish media on our return. I said: ‘No, I am more worried about hearing the comments as I walk along the street in Selkirk.’
I could not fault the players, because they had come through a system that wasn’t good enough to beat the All Blacks. I failed and maybe I wasn’t the right person to coach them. Saturday, 16 July 1983 – the date of the fourth Test – remains one of the saddest days in my life. A 38–6 defeat, a 4–0 series loss, there was no coming back from that. The dreams I had held three or four months earlier were in tatters. I was very disillusioned with coaching and with rugby and I was also totally against the whole Lions concept by this stage: it was so difficult to get the team together and prepare properly before going into the biggest Test matches these players would ever experience. Willie John [McBride] spoke to the press at the end of the tour and said he hoped the Lions would pick me to coach the next tour, as this experience had been invaluable. But I remember my own response to the media. In reply to one question about my future involvement, I asked them: ‘Is there life after death?’ It summed up how I was feeling.
Yet, in at least one respect, this adversity yielded a positive outcome in bringing the Scottish contingent closer together. And, despite the 1983 Five Nations developing into a tale of woe for the most part, with the Scots losing their opening three matches – notably in the absence of their injured playmaker, Rutherford – to Wales and France by 19–15 margins and Ireland by an even tighter 15–13 scoreline, they responded with a reaffirmation of their trademark thrawn pride to beat England 22–12 at Twickenham for what remains the last occasion on which the Scots achieved victory over the Auld Enemy in London. Ultimately, if it was a poor championship, it hinted at so much more and Telfer derived slivers of consolation from the optimism of his Borders confrères, Roy Laidlaw and John Rutherford, who were always disposed to look for the positives in any situation. Indeed, they defiantly told Telfer: ‘We may have lost this tour, but we will return to Scotland and win the Grand Slam next season, because we have learned about the weaknesses of the other [British] teams in the last few months.’
Rutherford was back for that against-the-odds outcome and it was a measure of the man’s abilities that I could not find a single person – from the Borders or anywhere else – with a negative word to say about the Selkirk stand-off. Instead, superlatives abounded, with ‘Rudd’ being variously described as ‘a genius’, ‘a prince’, ‘a true great’, ‘a legend’ and ‘one of the best there ever was in rugby’. And these were words from the mouths of hard-bitten Borderers such as Colin Deans, Alan Tomes and Keith Robertson.
What was undeniable was that Scotland were a diminished force without the presence of Rutherford and the same applied in the case of Telfer, who returned from the southern hemisphere, understandably crestfallen from his Lions experiences, but determined to make sure that he would finish his term as national coach on a high note. From this analysis, it might seem that he endured mixed fortunes during his time in charge, but Rutherford had another way of defining his mentor’s impact on his country’s fortunes. ‘I thought that, at Murrayfield, the team became almost unbeatable and Creamy’s record was magnificent,’ said the great No 10, in referring to the fact that the coach did not lose a single match at home in his tenure between 1980 and 1984, with the only minor glitches occurring in the drawn games against England and New Zealand.
Ultimately, perhaps that last contest offered the best summation of the symbiosis which existed between these sons of Melrose and Selkirk. It would have been easy for Telfer to have been sick of the sight of the All Blacks, such was the ruthlessness with which they had shattered his dreams. Yet, only a few months later, with even the most patriotic supporters possibly fearing the worst, the Scots, brimming with gusto and chutzpah and the bonnie panache of Rutherford, excelled in the task of pushing New Zealand all the way to the brink of defeat at Murrayfield, before the match finished tied at 25 points apiece. It was another case of so near and yet so far, but the Scots had talent to burn, and plenty of options at their disposal, and a true sense of their own worth. This was surely the abiding memory which they could take into 1984. And here was the evidence that the Borders could not only play a bit part in Scotland triumphs; they could emerge as protagonists in unforgettable pieces of sporting drama.