THE DEATH OF AN ICONIC
FIGURE
WHEN THE NEWS first surfaced that Bill McLaren had passed away in his beloved Borders in January 2010, it was one of those moments when millions of people, who had never met the man, but heard his mellifluous tones, stopped for an instant, enveloped by a wave of sadness. McLaren, one of a small band of commentators who could enthral those with little or no interest in rugby union, was a genuinely iconic figure; a self-effacing Scot who never allowed fame to transcend his innate courtesy to everybody he encountered, and was as famous in the wider world as when he walked round his native Hawick.
On one occasion, while travelling to a Scotland press conference in Dunedin in 1996, I only had to mention my origins for my taxi driver to start chatting about the people he regarded as the three sages of the Caledonian game; namely, Jim Telfer, John Rutherford and Bill McLaren. It was a triumvirate of contrasting personalities, to be sure, but with one common bond in that they were all born and bred in the Scottish Borders, and had stamped their imprint on the sport through their addiction to, and expertise with, the oval ball. And if you can please the rugby faithful in the Land of the Long White Cloud, you can do it anywhere else on the planet. This driver had never visited Scotland, but he had ample tales to relate about listening to Bill on his rickety old wireless as a teenager.
Hence the sorrow at the news of McLaren’s death, even if he had, by his own admission, enjoyed a good innings in living until he was 86, and particularly when one recalled how close he came to succumbing to tuberculosis more than 60 years earlier. In that sense, Bill was very much of his time and place: he recognised that, in the grand scheme, rugby was only a game and should never be regarded as a matter of life or death, especially in light of the dreadful carnage which McLaren witnessed while fighting at the Battle of Monte Cassino during the Second World War. And yet, for all that he returned from the conflict with some awful tableaux etched on his mind, you would rarely have guessed it from the instinctive good humour which he brought to any conversation. So too, if sport was a lifelong passion, it was also a bedrock for the qualities which he cherished as a teacher, a journalist and ‘the Voice of Rugby’ – a term which he never used himself, and which caused him some embarrassment when he was feted on his travels.
Understandably enough, his funeral provoked debate about some aspects of McLaren’s career, such as his perceived disenchantment with the introduction of professionalism in the union code in 1995. Yet, on the evidence of the interview which I carried out at his Hawick home in 2003, his love for rugby never wavered as he advanced into the winter of his life. On the contrary, Bill both confessed he could hardly wait for that year’s World Cup, and even admitted – he was always a prescient fellow – that he believed England had a decent chance of winning the tournament in Australia. But what struck me most was his response to my question about why rugby had appealed to him so much.
I suppose it is the fact it gives everybody a chance to play their part on the field, whether they are wee fellows or big hulking brutes of boys. The worst thing, when you are a PE teacher, is to hear children telling you that there is no place for them on a sports pitch, and that was one of the positive things about rugby and the way it was organised in the Borders, where we were all encouraged to enjoy ourselves first and worry about the technical details later on. It allowed everyone an opportunity to find a position which they could try to make their own, and I always had the idea that if you made youngsters feel wanted, they would enjoy being part of a team. The skinny ones could go to the wing if they wanted to run with the ball, the more muscular ones could learn about working together at the scrum, and the wee ones could be scrum-half or test themselves at fly-half. I remember watching a football match in Glasgow, way back in the mists of time, where this giant lad kept scoring goals for fun against these tiny wee defenders and I thought to myself: ‘That’s not a fair contest’. I am not criticising football, for the sake of it, but it just always struck me that rugby had a lot more going for it, in terms of making everyone feel that they could contribute to the game and work for the benefit of their team.
The Borders has thrived on this conviction for the last 150 years and longer, and there are worse philosophies than making everybody believe they have a role to play in sport, as in society. At McLaren’s funeral, there were tears in the January chill, but there was also laughter, respect, camaraderie, and an overwhelming sense that Bill had made a difference, not only to the thousands of Hawick children he had taught throughout his career, but to the close-knit little communities such as Melrose, Selkirk, Jedburgh, Kelso, Langholm, Galashiels and the rest of the places which comprise the Borders, an area which has produced a disproportionate number of international rugby stars since the sport came into existence. Indeed, even the bare statistic that a region with a population of roughly one-fortieth of that of Scotland has generated over 170 internationalists – around a sixth of the total number of men who have ever pulled on a blue jersey – demonstrates the efficacy of the work at the grass roots, the unpaid years of service from battalions of volunteers around Mansfield Park and the Greenyards, Netherdale and Philiphaugh, and the pride in their roots which encompasses the attitude of those who preach the rugby gospel. McLaren was one of the chief evangelists and enjoyed the ability to communicate technical details to the cognoscenti without ever losing touch with those who only watched one match a year to discover whether the Scots might beat the English.
In short, as his grandson, Gregor Lawson, declared, during a commemoration which amply celebrated the myriad ingredients of McLaren’s appeal: ‘To Nana [his wife, Bette], he was a hot water bottle, hooverer, dance partner, her golden boy, the love of her life and soulmate of 62 years. He was a modern dad, when dads weren’t very modern, a great mate and role model, and, to his grandchildren, he was everything a Papa should be. He was a great storyteller, and he was always great fun.’ Ultimately, in Lawson’s words, Bill was ‘a great Hawick man, a great rugby man, a great family man’. If anything, I would go further and assert that McLaren possessed all the diverse qualities which have explained and defined the rise and continuing success of rugby in the Borders.
Certainly, the faces in the crowd at his funeral testified to one simple truth: that his commentaries had coincided with most of the golden moments in the history of the game in Scotland, from the triumphs of the 1984 and 1990 Grand Slams to the brace of victories over England within the space of a week in 1971, and onwards to his country’s success in the last Five Nations Championship in 1999, as McLaren edged towards retirement, on his own terms, with his reputation wholly intact. Borderers were pivotal performers in all these achievements, whether as coaches, tough-tackling centres, mercurial half-backs or redoubtable props, and many came to pay their respects at Teviot Parish Church.
Alasdair Reid, a long-term colleague of mine, summed up the atmosphere superbly in the Herald when he a painted a vivid picture of the valediction to a nonpareil.
They came from the worlds of sport, and politics, and broadcasting. But they came in their greatest numbers from the tight-knit community of Borders rugby, determined to say a respectful farewell to one of their own. Big-boned men in club blazers sat, shoulder to burly shoulder, along the packed pews. Bill McLaren’s family had asked the mourners to wear their club blazers and they responded in huge numbers, sporting the crests and badges of the handful of sides which, between them, have earned the area global renown. A good number of them were in the congregation – John Jeffrey of Kelso, the White Shark himself, with John Rutherford of Selkirk, so dapper you would swear he could still do a shift for Scotland. There was Jed-Forest’s Gary Armstrong, Melrose’s Doddie Weir, and Gregor Townsend of Gala; great players and names that resonate far beyond the Tweed Valley. And, of course, we had the Hawick contingent too. McLaren’s nearest and dearest – not that you would have known it when he was commentating on their games – 58 players, who graduated from the green of Hawick to the blue of Scotland.
Had tuberculosis not struck him down in 1948, McLaren would almost certainly have added to their number. But the holy trinity were there: Jim Renwick, Colin Deans and Tony Stanger, 52 caps apiece, and a shared background in the primary school teams which McLaren coached. And Hugh McLeod, the teak-tough prop they called the Hawick Hardman when he was in his prime half a century ago. McLaren’s coffin was borne into and carried from the church on the shoulders of members of the current [Mansfield Park] team. It was the most fitting farewell for a thoroughly local hero.
By exploring some of the characteristics which McLaren shared with his Borders brethren, we can perhaps begin to comprehend why such a small region has proved instrumental in moulding Scotland’s rugby past, present and, hopefully, future. Bill, first and foremost, was a student of methodical preparation, with a keen eye for minutiae, and shared Jim Telfer’s approach that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains. In the Murrayfield media centre, there is an example of the detailed, pre-match research which he carried out and, even in his 70s, on that sojourn to New Zealand 15 years ago, he still devoted hours to the task of unearthing as many nuggets of information and career statistics as he possibly could about the All Blacks prior to joining up with his Scottish colleagues for the tourists’ briefing, oblivious to the fact that he was already steeped in knowledge about his compatriots. This was reminiscent of the thirst for new ideas and innovative tactics, which were so beloved of Telfer, a man who once digressed from an interview about the Five Nations in his office at Murrayfield by speaking about his regard for Marshal Tito, the old partisan leader in Yugoslavia. On many occasions, Telfer has been portrayed as a Victor Meldrewesque figure, and he certainly knew how to put the fear of God into those he regarded as abusing their talent, but it is more sensible to view him as one of those Borders individuals with a fiercely independent streak, who reckoned that Scotland would always be struggling in the numbers game, compared to the likes of France, England and, further afield, South Africa and Australia, so he and his colleagues had to act as guerrilla commanders, making a virtue of necessity, burrowing away at the grass roots, and creating the pathways for the next generation and the one after that. Almost from the day he picked up a rugby ball, Telfer was involved with teams, whether at club or district level, who had far fewer participants than were available to the coaches and selectors in Glasgow and Edinburgh, but he and McLaren shared the perspective that if you make a convert soon enough, you will have them for life. Essentially, it was a policy of ‘Education, Education, Education’ before the phrase was hijacked by Tony Blair, and it paid a rich dividend, both in Telfer’s ability to transform the British and Irish Lions into slayers of the Springboks in 1997, and McLaren’s ability to reel off names, caps, locations and trivia, as if it was the easiest thing in the world. It wasn’t, but this capacity for thriving on their teaching background and imparting the sheer, unalloyed joy of participating in rugby has served the Borders proud throughout its history.
Understandably, therefore, Telfer paid a rich tribute to McLaren when he learned of the latter’s passing. ‘Bill was always around when I was involved in rugby and, to me, he was like Robert Burns; an ordinary man, who was universally known. He was one in a million and unique as far as commentary was concerned,’ said the Melrosian. ‘He had a real feeling for the game and understood completely what it was all about. Coming from the Borders and with his innate knowledge, he could suss out players and talk to them until the cows came home. His biggest contribution was to non-rugby people, who used to listen to him, and Bill educated the world about rugby. He was a genuine rugby person, who loved speaking about the game to anybody that wanted to listen. He was also eager to learn the thoughts of [New Zealand’s peerless flanker] Richie McCaw and [the Australian winger] David Campese on the technical side, just as much as he would talk with the coaches. And, obviously, there was the voice, which was special.’
Ah yes, the voice. Which was as distinctive in its own milieu as Sinatra was in Las Vegas or Richie Benaud commentating from Australia during a dank Scottish winter. Even now, more than a year after his demise, McLaren’s broadcasts remain peerless examples of their craft; he never used 20 words where four or five would suffice and blended his pawky humour with enough technical information to carry out the job of instructing and entertaining in the same sentence. It was not a trick as such, but a skill which he perfected while recovering from the TB which nearly killed him. Yet although McLaren was fortunate to be born with such a richly evocative lilt, the words would have counted for nothing if he had been spouting gibberish or running up blind alleys.
Instead, he possessed a singular knack for taking a sidestep in an unexpected direction, or thinking on his feet, with descriptions of players which ideally suited the circumstances. A bedraggled scrum-half on a sodden afternoon in Selkirk might resemble ‘a drookit rat’, another was ‘as slippery as a baggy in a Borders burn’, a kick might ‘hirple’ through the posts, or two battling packs might indulge in ‘a bit of argy-bargy in the scrum’. Some players were ‘rampant stags’, others ‘ran like mad giraffes’, and his favourites, whether they hailed from Dundee, Durban or Dunedin – Bill was never biased in his life – were accorded their due with his almost limitless vocabulary. He was to the English language what John Rutherford was to Scotland; a master of any situation, who never forgot that he was there to serve others, and yet possessed so many adroit qualities that rugby was often elevated from a mere sport into a work of art. When one looks back to the 1980s and recalls the number of Borders stars who emerged in the same period, whether it was Rutherford at Selkirk, John Jeffrey at Kelso, Peter Dods at Gala or Roy Laidlaw at Jed-Forest, it was clear this was a halcyon period for the sport in the South of Scotland and the whole country benefited from the process. And if there were men and women toiling tirelessly behind the scenes at these organisations, another part of the attraction, which explained the spread in rugby’s appeal, was how these players seemed so down-to-earth and decent, especially compared with their football counterparts, who had not only made Scotland an international laughing stock at the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, but had become associated with drunken loutishness and a petulant prima-donnaism.
McLaren hated this ‘Look-at-me’ ostentation. He genuinely believed that rugby gained immensely from the fact that characters such as Laidlaw, Renwick and Jeffrey returned to their jobs in the Borders, whether working on farms or earning a living from their trades in plumbing and joinery, or as roofers, lorry drivers and mechanics. Jeffrey, one of the most redoubtable flankers of his generation, told me the story of how, after the Scots had thrashed Zimbabwe 51–12 in the 1991 World Cup – and this was a period of almost unprecedented riches for the Murrayfield brigade – he was not commended for the quality of his performance when he headed back to the Borders the next morning, but chided and derided for spilling the ball with the try line at his mercy! Yet, if this was being unduly nit-picking, such remarks kept the leading lights grounded and one of the reasons behind the South’s constant success lay in how quickly any perceived swollen heads had their egos deflated by their townsfolk. McLaren, himself, was regularly offered opportunities to spread his wings beyond rugby by the BBC and one suspects that he would have been equally adept at commentating on state occasions as sporting events, given his talent for plucking an apt phrase from the ether without resorting to mere cliché. But, as another son of the South, Allan Massie, the author and journalist, declared in The Scotsman, that would have interfered with Bill’s teaching and it was not to be countenanced. He was a schoolmaster all his working life and though he became one of the most famous, and certainly best-loved, of sporting commentators and journalists, he resisted invitations and inducements to become a full-time broadcaster. It would have thrown his life out of balance and while he enjoyed the respect and affection which he had earned, he had no taste for celebrity. Bill was modest and regarded himself as the servant of rugby rather than its voice. He loved the game and that came through in all of his commentaries, but he loved his wife, Bette, and his family more, and maybe his home town of Hawick, too, though I suspect that he would never have managed to disassociate the idea of Hawick from the idea of rugby.
Listening to him was like attending a match with a very knowledgeable friend. He also did the simple things that some commentators forget because they are too busy expressing their own opinions; making sure he identified the man with the ball or the tackler, for instance. He was also wonderfully fair and generous. Though a proud Scot, I doubt if anyone ever detected bias in his commentary – even when his son-in-law, Alan Lawson, scored a brilliant try against England in 1976. He never forgot that all sorts of people were listening to him, some who knew a lot about rugby, others who knew very little, and he had to cater for all of them. To do this satisfactorily is difficult and many good commentators in all sports can’t bring it off. Bill always could.
The advent of professionalism saddened him, though you would never have known it from his commentaries. He recognised the high quality of the professional game at its best, but he knew how much had been lost and regretted that international players were now cut off from the clubs and communities that had bred them. But he retired at a time of his own choosing [after the Melrose Sevens in 2002], before, so he said, someone tapped him on the shoulder and talked of a replacement. This was in character. So was the thrill which McLaren derived from Scotland’s displays throughout the 1999 Five Nations Championship when it briefly appeared that another glorious ensemble might be taking shape. I met him at the Stade de France in Paris, on a glorious sun-drenched afternoon in April, prior to the tussle with Les Bleus and despite his advancing years, Bill was still distributing his Hawick Balls, the boiled sweets which seemed to accompany him around the globe. He was optimistic about the visitors’ chances, albeit combined with a note of caution about how the conditions might suit the hosts, but, as it transpired, it was the Scots who produced a scintillating exhibition of power and panache, while scoring five first-half tries with a breathtaking joie de vivre. Once or twice, I glanced over at the BBC box, and there he was, revelling in the spectacle, but also concerned about the severity of the injury which saw the mercurial Thomas Castaignède stretchered off in the second minute of the contest. One would never have guessed that this, in his opinion, was one of his country’s finest ever displays, nor that much of their success was down to the magnificent contributions of the Borderers in the ranks.
Yet it would be hard to overstate the importance of three of that XV, in the guise of Gary Armstrong, Alan Tait and Gregor Townsend, who combined with a rare symbiosis, which reflected the diverse strands of Borders tradition from the early days. Armstrong, the terrier-like scrum-half, was following in a distinguished line of previous No 9s, but if anybody had ever put in more tackles and flung their body into the fray more often for their country than this little Jed knight, it was difficult to recall their name. Even when the Scots led 33–22 at the interval, Armstrong knew there would be a response from the French, if only to stifle the chorus of boos inside the stadium, and he urged his team to be ready for the onslaught. However, such was his unstinting commitment and relentless industry that it often felt as if there were two or three Armstrong clones on the pitch. But nobody was surprised: wee Gary had done this since the outset of his career, transcending all manner of setbacks in the process.
He had also suffered more injuries than the majority of his contemporaries and the IRB’s sanctioning of professionalism at least allowed him to make the move from the Borders to Newcastle and set himself and his family up with something more substantial than back-slapping congratulations and a pint behind every bar in Jedburgh. To a significant extent, this was where McLaren’s argument broke down, because it was all very well for the doctors, accountants, property developers and lawyers to rejoice in amateurism; they knew they were secure once they had packed away their boots. Armstrong, a working-class man from a rugby-daft family, was not so fortunate, in which light the arrival of the pay-for-play era provided him with an element of security for the future.
Tait, his fellow Borderer and Newcastle team-mate, was an even starker example of the choices which had confronted many of the lower-paid sports stars in the South of Scotland. He had switched codes to rugby league in the late 1980s and, for a while at least, was treated as something of a pariah figure in Scottish circles, as if it was a dreadful crime to be paid for excelling on the sporting stage. (And this paled in comparison to some of his predecessors, who were shunned by their former friends after moving to the league circuit in the 1950s and 1960s). Eventually, just as Jonathan Davies did in Wales, the so-called prodigal son returned to the union environment and duly showed his compatriots what they had been missing for the best part of a decade. Indeed, Tait was one of the linchpins of Scotland’s success in that 1999 championship and it was noticeable that when he retired at the conclusion of the World Cup a few months later, his country fell into a slough of despond from which, in truth, they have never really recovered.
If Armstrong and Tait were the hard-as-nails, bristling bulwarks at the heart of that Caledonian line-up, Townsend was the fellow with the artistic temperament and a sprinkling of magic in his repertoire. Throughout Borders history, there had been other instances of this amalgam of silk and steel and, invariably, it required both properties to prosper. Yet, when the disparate elements clicked together, it frequently offered glimpses of genius, and the fashion in which Townsend, bolstered by the reassuring presence of Tait in the centre and Armstrong watching his back, controlled the proceedings in Paris was as masterly as it was mesmerising. The following morning, a crowd of us bumped into McLaren at Charles de Gaulle airport and he was still purring at the fashion in which the Scots had performed out of their skins. On most other weekends, their win would only have been good enough to earn them the runners-up berth in the campaign, but Sunday brought another shock when Wales, outpunched and outfought for the majority of the proceedings against England, somehow managed to stay on their feet and snatch victory with a Scott Gibbs try and Neil Jenkins conversion in the dying seconds of the match. In the Borders, Telfer remarked that it might have been raining outside, but the sun was shining radiantly inside his house. McLaren, too, was enthralled by the manner in which his compatriots had soared to the Five Nations title during a dramatic denouement. Neither of them had any personal antipathy towards the RFU’s finest, far from it. This was pride in Scotland’s derring-do rather than Schadenfreude. But it was a success which would not have been possible without the Borders influence.
Why should this have happened? Why did football exert a grip everywhere else in Scotland when rugby held sway in the Borders? There was one straightforward reason: the zeal shown by the Victorian devotees, who had established thriving 15-a-side organisations in their towns and villages before the Old Firm were even in existence. Next, there was the size and shape issue: the South had a major agricultural base and many of the farmers had more bulk and muscle than pace – in short (and tall), they were better suited to rugby than any other pursuit. There again, one cannot ignore the influence of men such as Ned Haig, the butcher who dreamt up the idea of Sevens, which has now become a global pursuit, allied to the development work carried out at the likes of Hawick and Gala, whose founders realised that they had to provide opportunities to more than 20 or 30 players, and they could not simply cater for the elite. This, in turn, filtered down to the schools, and generations of children grew up with the game in their blood. As McLaren, one of those who was an integral part of the process, told me, while we were watching the Hawick Sevens on a frozen April afternoon at Mansfield Park: ‘It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to be playing rugby from an early age. And once you have success, and you have your own [Borders] league, that gives the youngsters something else to aim at.’ He always feared that the collapse of the traditional industries and subsequent migration of many in the Borders to the cities in the late 1980s and 1990s might weaken the standard in his region – and Bill was uncharacteristically gloomy about the SRU’s messing around with the Borders professional team, which came and went, and lived and died, almost on a whim – and, to some extent, that pessimism was justified. Nonetheless, when one examines the sheer numbers who came through the ranks from the Borders, it was a testimony to the link between the schools and their local clubs.
That same process never happened in Edinburgh and Glasgow, where the private schools created their rugby structures without bothering to look beyond their own enclaves for players and coaches. It might be simplistic to claim that the sport flourished in the South, because it was run on egalitarian principles, but if there is truth in the adage that if you catch a kid young, you capture him forever, the Borders recognised the best means of setting up a conveyor belt of talent. In Glasgow, on the other hand, the likes of Queen’s Park dedicated themselves to spreading the football gospel, while the likes of Clydesdale Cricket Club organised a winter team, from which eventually emerged Rangers FC. (Mind you, it should not be ignored that this is also how Hawick RFC came into being, when their cricketers decided that, in order to keep fit when the nights drew in, they should begin playing football. Both the association and the rugby varieties were considered before they elected for the latter and it has to be wondered how different the history of Scottish rugby might have been if they had gone in the other direction!)
Success, of course, breeds popularity and the trophy-winning exploits of McLaren’s beloved club in the halcyon period between 1945 and 1972, when they won eight unofficial championships and 15 Border League titles, was the catalyst for players flocking to the sport in ever-greater numbers. But this brings us to another important factor, whereby these clubs built up momentum in rugby, at the same time as football was king everywhere else. Expressed bluntly, the Borderers liked a scrap, and there was scope for some genuine physical confrontations in their favourite sport, which differed from the football ethos, which revolved more around individual skill than collective might.
This led to a polarisation between the South and the cities. Duggie Middleton, the Heriot’s historian, pointed out to me the fashion in which the Borders fans would denigrate their capital opponents as a ‘bunch of pen-pushers’, whilst some of the central-belt teams made cheap gibes about the ‘brainless’ mentality of the farming fraternity. Much of this was good-natured banter, but a greater truth lurked under the surface. Namely that when the going got tough, whether at club or district level, it was the men from the South of Scotland who would invariably do whatever was required to seize the initiative, leading to a situation where even the likes of John Beattie – one of the meanest hombres ever to represent Scotland and the Lions – spoke of his apprehension about embarking on trips to places such as Langholm, where there was a genuinely hostile reception for visitors.
This aggressive quality meant that the city slickers frequently came a cropper on their trips down to the Borders even when they were of equal ability to, or marginally better than, their Southern counterparts. It was not so much that the likes of Heriot’s and Glasgow Accies were in the habit of producing players with a soft centre, but rather that clubs in the mould of Hawick, Gala and Kelso knew what it took to get over the line, and also had experience of the flak they would face from their peers if they came up short. The late Brian Gilbert, a man who coached in Glasgow for most of his career, spelled out the different mentalities which existed between the two areas with the memorable phrase: ‘When the going gets tough, our guys go skiing.’ But the astute Gilbert made several other telling observations about why the Borders was such a hotbed of rugby.
Down in Hawick, they pin up the team for the following Saturday’s match on the notice board in the town centre and there is no place to hide once your name is on that list. The locals know everybody, they argue about the selections, there is an incredible amount of competition for places, and it all adds up to a situation where rugby is at the heart of the community. Up here in Glasgow – and it is much the same in Edinburgh – you can have a bad game and slip off quietly into the night and you can pretty much guarantee that you won’t bump into anybody who was at the match, which means there isn’t the same pressure on you to perform at your best, week in, week out. I have tried to get the message through to our youngsters that the success of the Borders sides hasn’t happened by accident and that we are never going to reach the same standards if we don’t care as much as they do. But, in the final analysis, if you have the attitude that it is only a bit of fun and that it doesn’t matter that much whether you win or lose, you are going to be struggling when you come up against guys who are playing for their whole town.
For the most part, this Borders obsession had positive consequences, but, occasionally, there was justified criticism of the ‘Aye-Been’ attitude to any new developments in the sport, whereby the traditionalists stuck to rigid conventions and rituals which were past their sell-by date, when they needed to be more forward-thinking. By the early 1990s, it was clear to most of us that rugby was destined to become a professional sport sooner rather than later – though many were surprised at how rapidly the transition occurred – and when the New Zealanders arrived in Britain for their winter tour in 1993, it was obvious that, to all intents and purposes, their squad was packed with players whose livelihoods amounted to the full-time pursuit of rugby excellence. The evidence of the gulf in standards between their second-string team and the hapless South of Scotland side, which lined up against the All Blacks on a Wednesday afternoon in November, could hardly have been more cruelly exposed than by the eventual 84–5 margin of defeat: an outcome which not only led to an unprecedented amount of soul-searching among players, fans and the media, but also prompted jokes to the effect that somebody should have told the Scots that they were allowed to move once the haka was finished! McLaren was there that day, and even the master found it a tough assignment to gloss over the deficiencies of his compatriots. He eventually reached the stage where he stopped saying ‘and x or y will be disappointed with that …’ and replaced it with lavish praise for the Kiwis.
However, many other Borderers were less inclined to paper over the cracks. Craig Chalmers, one of the new breed of hard-nosed Scots with a professional approach to rugby, even if he was not earning a wage for participating in the sport, warned his compatriots that they had to wake up and appreciate that the talent in the national game was spread a foot wide and an inch deep. Iwan Tukalo also voiced his concerns: ‘Those who have claimed that if the full Scottish side is okay, then there can’t be much wrong with the system, will have had this myth shattered by Wednesday’s debacle.’
It was a clash between conflicting philosophies, and an argument which raged on behind the scenes for the best part of the next decade, yet, just as they had done so many times before, the Scots regrouped and were involved in a Borders-inspired revival when a Scottish Districts Select, coached by John Rutherford and captained by Gary Armstrong, produced a morale-boosting victory over Auckland in the same month as the South’s slaughter. And while this particular Kiwi provincial line-up was not remotely of the same quality as the one which had beaten the British and Irish Lions a few months earlier – bearing in mind that ten of their front-line personnel were absent, otherwise engaged on New Zealand duty – the Scots, too, were a relatively inexperienced collective, yet managed to inflict the only defeat which Auckland suffered on their tour.
The win was notable for a number of reasons, not least the pre-match speeches which were made by both the aforementioned Border heroes. Rutherford, so urbane and genial in his normal day-to-day existence, knew that his troops would need to get down and dirty to have any chance and he duly fired them up with a piece of Telfer-style rhetoric. ‘You are playing against Auckland. They are a top New Zealand province. They are ruthless. You might be the nicest guy in the world off the pitch, you might be a great sportsman on it, but against these people, you have to be an out-and-out c***.’
That was the cue for Armstrong to follow with his own exhortation to his confrères, before finishing his address with the words: ‘And just remember what Rudd told you … when you go out against boys like these, you have got to play like c***s!’
Once the contest had started, however, Armstrong was at the heart of everything good in his side’s endeavours, acting as one of the catalysts for a win which demonstrated that reports of the demise of Scottish rugby had been exaggerated. And that incident might have served as a microcosm of the diverse brands of people that visitors will encounter in the Borders. There are the silent types, the lads who do their talking through their actions and make a resounding impression on rugby fields across the globe. And if you needed words, there was always Bill McLaren. No wonder there were so many mourners packed into the pews of Teviot Parish Church that cold January day.