THE GREEN MACHINE
VERY FEW SPORTING success stories happen by accident. They might be the consequence of one special group of players coming together at the same time, whose exploits cast a long shadow over those who follow in their wake, or they may spring from the vision of a solitary far-sighted benefactor. But, speaking as somebody who has covered all manner of pursuits in the last 25 years, experience tells me that Celtic and Manchester United would not have risen to greatness in the 1960s and 1990s without the efforts of a whole range of behind-the-scenes architects of their clubs’ heroics, whether in the scouting system which served Jock Stein so well, or the endeavours of mentors in the mould of Teddy Scott and Eric Harrison, who unearthed diamonds for Alex Ferguson.
On a smaller scale, Kingussie have prospered throughout the decades in shinty, because of the development work, which carries on year in, year out in their hamlet, just as Freuchie won cricket’s National Village Cup in 1985 because their captain, president and general factotum, Dave Christie, devoted countless hours of unpaid energy to ensuring that every single person in the Fife community had the opportunity to pick up a bat and ball and discover for themselves the treasures involved in the summer game. As he told me, in terms which explained why this doughty individual has a street named after him in his birthplace: ‘I’ve never believed that Scots are born thinking that football is the only sport which matters. If they end up playing football, because they were never offered the chance to try their hand at anything else, I think that’s a pretty sad state of affairs. But, from what I have seen over many years – the last 50 years in fact – Scots love sport and will take an interest in cricket, rugby, tennis, golf and any other pursuit if you catch them young and make them realise the enjoyment they can get from hitting a ball, or serving an ace, or scoring a try. But it’s up to us, the adults, to capture their imaginations.’
In Scottish rugby, the means by which Hawick rose from being a good club to a feared institution owed precious little to mere fortune, but was more a natural by-product of the network of fiercely-committed players, coaches, committee officials and teachers, whose labours transformed the Mansfield Park organisation from the prime club in the Borders into the best in Scotland by a country mile in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, whenever and wherever there have been innovations in the Caledonian game, Hawick have usually swept all before them, whether winning the first ever Border League or repeating that feat when Scotland finally established an official national championship. Even in the 1990s, when the Scottish Cup sprung into being, who else should bring thousands of their townsfolk up to Murrayfield, replete with specially-composed songs and other tokens of pride in their roots than Hawick, who duly triumphed in the inaugural competition?
Perhaps predictably, the efficacy of their fabled ‘Green Machine’ has elicited a degree of envy and criticism from some of their opponents, although the Mansfield men simply have to point to their wondrous roll of honour – including 43 Border League victories and 12 ‘official’ Scottish titles, in addition to boasting all of 58 Scottish internationalists – to drive home the message that their awe-inspiring passion for rugby has yielded a rich seam of talent, both for themselves and the wider Scottish community. Of course, it helped that Hawick was the largest town in the South, but they only had a tiny fraction of the population of Glasgow or Edinburgh (the 2001 census listed the figure as 14,801), yet progressed to the stage in the early 1970s where they were virtually able to field a first XV with international experience. That process did not come to fruition without lashings of perspiration on the pitch, but more importantly, a tremendous amount ofmissionary work at the grass roots, from selfless characters who did not suffer fools gladly, but whose fervour and inherent love for the game guaranteed there was never any danger of their precious club developing into a clique or, in modern parlance, a vanity project.
We have already highlighted how they were born, initially as a means of keeping the town’s cricketers fit during the lengthy Scottish winters. But, by the time we advance to the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were other reasons why Hawick flourished. In the first place, recognising that they had to tap into every conceivable well of talent, they created a junior system which sparked a mustard-keen rivalry among their emerging talent and ensured that nobody’s place was ever secure, particularly if they were foolish enough to treat selection as a right and not a privilege. Thus we had the establishment of Hawick Trades and Hawick Wanderers in 1946 and 1954 respectively, who augmented the links which had previously been formed with Hawick PSA (founded in 1919), Hawick Linden (1921) and Hawick Harlequins (1930). With such a disparate strand of rugby on offer, it was hardly surprising that the community became as famous for the sight of hundreds of youngsters playing on Saturday mornings as it did for the town’s annual Common Riding festival and the quality of the produce from their mills.
Then, there was the influence of a triumvirate, whose combined efforts, on and off the field, were pivotal to their organisation’s prodigious achievements during the next three or four decades. The first of these Three Wise Men was Hugh McLeod, the redoubtable prop, who represented Scotland on 40 occasions between 1954 and 1962 and travelled with the British and Irish Lions to South Africa in 1955. This fellow, who earned the sobriquet of the ‘Hawick Hardman’, soaked up the lessons from his stint with the Lions and gradually, as much through the sheer force of his magnetic personality as the quality of his performances, instilled in his compatriots an attitude that rugby union players might be amateurs, but that did not have to prevent them from being professional in their training and preparation for matches. McLeod could make the toughest of opponents wilt under his glare and once, according to his great friend Bill McLaren, delivered the following speech to his forwards: ‘Come here, my wee disciples. Now, ah want to tell ee that ah’ve been asked to lead this pack tomorrow. Ah’m no very keen on the job, and if any of you lot want to be pack leader, just let me know and I’ll put in a word. Meanwhile, the next one who opens his trap will get my boot bloody hard at his arse.’
The second of the trio was Robin Charters, the resplendent Hawick centre who made three appearances for his country in 1955, and later became the SRU president at a stage when rugby was moving inevitably towards the pay-for-play era. In between, he was a master motivator and astute thinker on the game, whose passion for the union code was only equalled by his conviction that traditional Borders values remained vital, no matter what else might change. He said the following in 2000:
For years, Hawick won the Border League and if we didn’t, then we were considered to be a poor side. It was all a question of numbers. Hawick had more players and it had all to do with local prosperity. Despite the economic problems [as the 20th century moved on], rugby was a great attraction. Townsfolk always supported their club – it was a place to go – and there was a wonderful social life. There was a lot of patter with the opposition and it was great fun.
But somehow, all that has gone in the professional game. We know that the game had to change and we had to change with it. But I take the view that we call it sport still, but it’s not sport. Our definition of sport was something else – you played hard and you played to win, but you enjoyed yourself doing it and, whatever the result of the match, you enjoyed mixing after the game with the opposition. The fact is that somebody has to come second. But nowadays if you lose, then nobody wants to know you.
The third member of the triumvirate was Derrick Grant, another in the long line of Borderers whom it would be preferable to have as a friend rather than an enemy. He served his community and his country with singular distinction, whether winning 14 caps as an indefatigable flanker between 1965 and 1968, or graduating into the role of Hawick’s hugely-successful coach in the 1970s and 1980s. Grant, as one might have anticipated, could be a tough customer when it was necessary, but none of the illustrious former stars who were interviewed for this book had a single negative word to say about their erstwhile mentor. Instead, they testified to the meticulous nature of his pre-match preparations and rigorous analysis of his opponents, his openness to new ideas such as organising team meetings on the Fridays before games, and improving the athleticism of his squad by putting them through 2,000-yard gallops when they pitched up at Mansfield Park on Tuesday evenings. And the overriding impression which emerged was that he shared many of the qualities of Jock Stein; namely, that while he detested players who squandered their talent, and had no patience with those who settled for second best, he could mix the carrot and stick to such mesmerising effect that his players would willingly have walked over hot coals in their bare feet if he had asked them to do so.
The cumulative impact of these characters can hardly be overstated in steering Hawick towards a position where they shared Queen Victoria’s approach to the possibility of defeat. In the seasons immediately after the Second World War, the club could not crank up sufficient momentum to leave their rivals trailing in their wake, and Gala, Melrose and Selkirk all enjoyed a share of the honours prior to Langholm celebrating their solitary Border League triumph in 1959. Yet, just as the times they were a-changing in music with Bob Dylan and the Beatles to the fore, so, too, Hawick began churning out a remarkable number of gifted personnel, fuelled by the twin peaks of their burgeoning junior set-up and the work of McLeod, Charters, Grant and Bill McLaren, the latter of whom nurtured scores of rugby-daft youngsters from the region’s primary schools.
The consequence was an abundance of riches and a diverse range of personalities with glimmers of magic in the back line from such gifted performers as George Stevenson, Wattie Scott and Norman Davidson, allied to the formidable graft of forwards in the mould of Hugh McLeod, Adam Robson and Jack Hegarty, even as a clutch of stars from the younger generation started making an impression in the town’s junior ranks.
Ian Barnes, who later went on to represent Scotland in the 1970s, was one of the youngsters who was exhilarated by the atmosphere around Hawick during that period, even as the club capitalised on the foundations laid down by the likes of McLeod.
It all began when Hugh came back from the Lions trip, bursting with ideas he had picked up on his trip to the southern hemisphere, and suddenly, you had this group of people coming together, who created a synergy around Mansfield Park, and it was a brilliant time to be growing up in the town if you wanted to play rugby. The thing is that there was plenty of money in Hawick at that stage – the mills were going full pelt – and my generation was very lucky, because we had this situation where there were great players, such as Hugh and Robin Charters to look up to, and a natural progression between these fellows and the likes of Derrick Grant, while Bill [McLaren] was working in teaching and doing a terrific job of getting more and more children interested in the sport. It meant that rugby was as popular down in Hawick as football was in parts of Glasgow and I can remember going out and playing touch rugby when the weather was too bad or it was too dark, and a lot of people’s lives revolved around the game.
With all the other sides in Hawick, such as the Linden team and the Trades team, you had what was almost the perfect structure, and the rivalry between the various clubs in the town was incredible. I was involved in some of these games and, believe me, they were some of the most savage encounters in which I ever took part, because everybody was absolutely determined to force their way into the Hawick first XV. There were other times where we travelled down to England and played against opponents like Whitehaven and Workington Town and it was f***ing brutal, no-holds-barred stuff. But, because of these experiences, you soon learned that you had to stand your ground, and it meant you were ready to make the step up if you saw your name on the Hawick notice board.
Looking back, it was a really vibrant town in the 1950s and 1960s and I suppose that there was also a bit of good fortune in the fact that people of the calibre of Jim Renwick, Colin Deans, Norman Pender and Alan Tomes all came through in the same group. But, on the other hand, Derrick left pretty much nothing to chance, and he was definitely ahead of his time in so many different ways. To be honest, I remember going to a Scotland session after being called up into the national team [in 1972] and it was quite embarrassing when you compared how basic it was to what Derrick was doing with us down in the Borders. I don’t want to sound too nostalgic, but there genuinely was a huge amount of community spirit about the town and rugby was the glue which held everything together. I grew up living next door to Bill [McLaren] and he was the first person in the street to own a television and when we weren’t playing or training, we were round there watching Champion the Wonder Horse. And everybody was spurring everybody else on. But, of course, people had jobs in those days, and the youngsters didn’t have to go elsewhere to search for work. So that made it easier for the people who were running rugby in Hawick to hang on to the best of the emerging talent.
The results allowed no room for argument. In the period between 1945 and 1972, the club’s supremacy over the rest of the competition, not merely in the South, but the whole of Scotland, eventually grew all-pervading. They wrapped up 15 Border League titles, secured the unofficial championship eight times, and even earned fame as Sevens specialists, although they gradually encountered a rising challenge from Gala in that sphere. But, unsurprisingly considering these exploits, no Scotland team was complete without at least one or two Teris in the line-up and McLeod (40 caps), George Stevenson (24), Adam Robson (22) and Grant (14) accumulated 100 caps between them, while another 15 members of the Green Machine pulled on their country’s jersey and the rugby league scouts swarmed around Mansfield Park like wasps at a July picnic. Even if we accept that Hawick had a numerical advantage over their Border neighbours, this was still the stuff of which dreams were made and it was a testimony to the boundless energy, vaulting ambition and volunteer corps who were content to be part of a process which brought them no personal glory, but made them feel part of something special.
Opinions vary as to which of the various Hawick ensembles was the pick of the bunch.
The older fraternity sang the praises of Jack Hegarty’s team of the 1959–60 campaign, with Derrick Grant’s brother, Oliver, an integral member of their fearsome pack, while Drew Broatch and Glen Turnbull formed an incisive, imaginative half-back pairing. This latter pair were subsequently lured to England by the professional league code, but it was a measure of the strength in depth which the club boasted that replacements slotted into their places almost seamlessly. Even once Grant retired from playing, his coaching expertise ensured that the trophy cabinet was never empty at Mansfield Park, and one could sympathise with their opponents, who must have felt akin to poor old Sisyphus shoving his bloody rock up the hill for all eternity. The Border League turned into something resembling the modern Scottish Premier League in football, where all the participants bar the Old Firm are scrapping for third place, and if it was not Jim Renwick and Alastair Cranston teaming up in the centre, it was Ian Barnes and Norman Pender forming a juddering partnership and knocking seven bells out of opposing packs. Nothing lasts forever, of course, but it must have felt very close to heaven for the Hawick confrères when they transferred their collective skills from their club to Scotland without any visible drop in quality. Renwick, who is one of most unassuming people it would be possible to meet, and yet glittered on so many of his 52 caps for Scotland, had this to say:
We had our moments at Murrayfield with a 10–9 win in 1973 against a Welsh side with nine Lions and we also beat them in 1975 and 1981. I can still remember the year of the snow down there in 1978, though, where we had seven Hawick men on the field by the end. We didn’t win, but I remember that as a special day which probably won’t happen again. We started with six [Renwick, Cranston, Deans, Pender, Tomes and Brian Hegarty] and then ‘Greco’ [Graham Hogg] came on, up against Gerald Davies, on the wing. Never easy!
Bill McLaren used to say to me that he enjoyed commentating in the seventies the most, when Gerald, JJ and JPR Williams, Phil Bennett and Barry John were the men. Folk wouldn’t have guessed it, but he told me he got carried away during these games and you could well understand why. It was not as predictable as rugby is now: boys just played off the cuff and were prepared to be adventurous. Yes, there were a lot of mistakes, but you were out there trying to use whatever skill you had to outfox your opposite number, and we had plenty of good players who reacted to that and thrived on it.
It obviously helped these individuals’ collective confidence that Hawick had settled into such an all-conquering groove, winning the Border League eight seasons in a row and an astonishing 21 times in 26 seasons from 1959–60 to 1984–85. There was continuity, the ability to shove opponents backwards in the mud and glaur or scythe through them with some sparkling back play on the days when the sun shone and the pitches were more conducive to running rugby. Mansfield Park became a fortress, an arena from which visiting Glasgow and Edinburgh collectives rarely escaped without injury, either to their person or their reputations – or both! – but they could at least reflect on how they were involved in one of the truly phenomenal periods for any Scottish team in any sport.
Renwick, for his part, was both a centre of evidence and a chap who could slip into the background of any picture, rather like Zelig. When we spoke for this book, he was instinctively inclined to heap praise on others in the Hawick ranks, whether in the early guidance he received from the Three Wise Men, or the totemic influence of such doughty stalwarts as Jack Hegarty, Norman Pender and Norman Suddon, or one of his own icons, George Stevenson. Yet nothing should disguise the myriad qualities which this little marvel possessed at his peak, nor how he broke through the ranks at Mansfield Park to ignite the dullest game and spark excitement from any position on his field.
For me, Derrick Grant was the real driving force. He had a vision, he had ambition and he had such an incredible sense of purpose that he drove the ship forward. This was in the early days of coaching, but he was a pioneer who pushed us to become better players than we might otherwise have been and I don’t believe that his contribution to Scottish rugby and his vast knowledge and experience have been properly recognised.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Hawick was just crazy about the game. You left school and you got a job, and you poured your heart and soul into working during the day and playing rugby at night and at weekends. My dad and my brother both played for the club as well and it just seemed the most natural thing in the world to get up early in the morning, put in a decent shift, get home, pick up your kit, and head down to the rugby ground. We never even thought about whether we were tired. Tired!! We were young men and this was a fantastic life and there was so much going on that it was really exciting.
In the early days, I looked up to George Stevenson, because he was so unpredictable – he could be making an arse of it one minute and then suddenly produce a piece of magic, which took your breath away in the next. There were lots of heroes, Hugh McLeod, Colin Deans, Alan Tomes … where on earth do you stop? And, of course, there was the constant presence of Bill McLaren in the background, keeping an eye on you, and always passing on a quick word of encouragement whenever he could. He was a one-off as well.
I remember him teaching us and you weren’t allowed to go overboard about scoring a try with Bill, because you had to show respect to your opponents. I think he would have looked at somebody like the English guy [Chris Ashton, whose extravagant celebrations were a feature of the 2011 Six Nations Championship] and told him to cut it out. Bill loved the game and he had the words and the enthusiasm to make others love it as well, without feeling the need to bang on about winning all the time. His message was that enjoying what we were doing was the main thing. And it rubbed off on most of us.
Don’t get me wrong, we were brought up in a pretty hard school, and the supporters in Hawick made sure we never let our standards slip or, when we did, they were quick to let us know about it. There was pressure, it was there when you walked up to the notice board in the town centre to discover whether or not you were in the team for Saturday’s match – because nobody bothered to telephone you one way or the other – and if your name wasn’t on the list, you were shattered. Of course you were. But you weren’t playing for money or fame, so it wasn’t the be-all and end-all. You still wished your team-mates well, and wanted them to succeed, but it made you doubly determined to do everything you could do to guarantee that your name would be there the next time around.
I think that system taught you about the euphoria which rugby could bring. It also got people used to the idea that losing was no disgrace as long as you had given it everything you had. During my career, whenever and wherever Hawick played, we were the king pins, everybody wanted to knock us off our perch, and that can be tough to deal with if you haven’t been properly prepared. But, because we had all risen through the structure together, the knowledge that everybody wanted to beat us simply made us better and better players. Derrick knew that, he had worked out what was required for us to keep making progress and retain our hunger, and if he ever caught you slacking, well … you just didn’t! There were so many players trying their damnedest to get into the team that you had to regard every game as being very, very important, not least because Derrick never lost sight of the fact that we were out there fighting on Saturdays, not for ourselves, but for the town which had given us the opportunity to play in the first place. Some people thought he was hard. He had to be. Introverts don’t make good coaches!
With these ingredients, allied to the spirit of collectivism which infused Hawick teams throughout their decades of success, it was no wonder that the Green Machine left fans and journalists alike incessantly searching for new superlatives. There were epic tussles, classic confrontations, both in the Border League and the Scottish championship and, occasionally, the two competitions converged, such as when Hawick made the short journey to Netherdale to confront their deadly rivals, Gala, in the winter of 1982. By this stage, the hosts had not merely caught up with their local adversaries, but surpassed them, en route to winning two consecutive Scottish titles and, in advance of the match, there was a sense that Hawick had perhaps relinquished their aura and former majesty.
With hindsight, the quality of both sets of combatants was lip-smacking; the national selectors could have chosen a first-rate XV from these team sheets. Gala were bolstered by such sterling performers as the usually metronomic full-back, Peter Dods, the future Grand Slam-winning captain, Jim Aitken, and such tenacious and talented warriors as Tom Smith, Derek White and Gordon Dickson among their impressive pack.
Yet the visitors also oozed class and clout in most departments, with their side featuring the likes of Renwick, Cranston, Deans, Tomes, Derek Turnbull and Alastair Campbell when the action commenced in front of a massive – and voluble – audience, who screamed their support for the respective endeavours of the Maroons and Greens.
This was the kind of afternoon in sport when minuscule fractions often make a massive difference, and when tabloid journalists had their pens ready – in the days before laptops and the Internet – to commend or condemn players as ‘battlers’ or ‘bottlers’. Sadly, from Gala’s perspective, the normally rock-solid Dods suffered a nightmare day with the boot, missing half a dozen kicks, which might have made all the difference at the end, while Colin Gass, who had only recently switched allegiance from Gala to Hawick, was almost as profligate for his new club, in squandering four penalty opportunities. Given this litany of blemishes, the tussle remained nail-bitingly tight all the way through to its dramatic denouement: and despite the visitors leading 9–3 at the interval with a brace of penalties from Gass and Renwick and a drop goal from the former, to a solitary penalty for Dods, his side gained renewed hope when Jim Maitland scored a wonderful individual try, latching on to his own kick ahead and duly touching down. Normally, Dods would have slotted the conversion in his sleep, but this was not a run-of-the-mill encounter, and his attempt drifted wide, to the groans of the home fans.
Nonetheless, their mood improved considerably when Maitland sent Gala 10–9 ahead with the clock ticking down on Hawick’s hopes of regaining the ascendancy in the Borders. Then, suddenly, in the fourth minute of injury time, who should pop up to apply the coup de grâce with the boot than Renwick, when his opponents were penalised for killing the ball. He had been in these tight spots so often before that the derision of the Gala aficionados went clean over his head, and he kept his cool to snatch an improbable victory. ‘I looked over to Colin, or to anyone else who fancied the kick, to take it,’ recalled Renwick. ‘In the end, I just took it myself. I thought: “Just keep your head down and hit it.”’ It had been a narrow squeak for the Green Machine – who had earlier gained a reprieve when the referee, Brian Anderson, ruled out a Smith try for offside – but the sizzling atmosphere inside the ground, the realisation that this truly mattered to both clubs and their adherents, and the dramatic, fluctuating fortunes at the death, reflected Renwick’s own view that nothing on the club circuit surpassed a pulsating derby between the Borders elite, whether it was taking place in February 1902 or 1982. As he told me: ‘We sometimes won matches because we never knew when we were beaten and kept fighting until the final whistle, not because we were the better side on the day.’ And that is the mark of champions in every pursuit, and goes a long way towards explaining why Hawick had the capacity to grind out victories where any rational analysis of the statistics in the contest would have decreed they should lose.
In a sense, even when their feeder system stuttered, the buzz around the community and desire of those who lived in it to play rugby at the highest level transcended any early reservations about some of the great components of the Green Machine. It might seem incredible nowadays, but Colin Deans, probably the best hooker who has ever worn the Scotland jersey, struggled to convince his mentors that he was anything other than a journeyman forward at the start of his career. ‘I didn’t play for the High School, because my PE teacher, Ernie Murray, told me I would never make a player. And I never wanted to be a hooker as such,’ said the stalwart individual, who subsequently accumulated 52 Scotland caps in that position and shone for the Lions. ‘My father [Peter Deans, who wore the No 2 shirt with distinction for many years at Mansfield Park] told me always to be the first to every line-out. It’s advice which I still pass on to youngsters.’
Even Derrick Grant remained to be convinced and initially selected the young Deans in the second row, where he battled away with trademark industry and dedication, until he eventually persuaded the Hawick sages to see sense and field him where he could dictate the tempo of matches and exhibit his powers to best effect. More than anyone else, it was Bill McLaren who spotted the potential of the nine-year-old, when he took part in the following exchange, which later supplied the title to Deans’ autobiography.
McLaren: ‘Hey you, Tubby, what’s your name?’
Pupil: ‘Colin Deans, sir.’
McLaren: ‘Is your father Peter?’
CD: ‘Yes sir.’
McLaren: ‘You’re a hooker, then.’
Many years passed before the rest of Hawick grasped the wisdom of that judgement, but it was a testimony to Deans’ dedication that he was less interested in where he turned out for his community, than being allowed to gain entry to the Green Machine at a time when they were the most formidable organisation in Scotland. He had grown up watching Hawick Wanderers, where his dad was the president, and it encapsulated the attitude of the youngsters in the town that no amount of setbacks or teething problems dashed their aspirations to excel at rugby. Instead, they used them as a motivating force and, in Deans’ case, were assisted in their endeavours by the tutelage of the ubiquitous McLaren.
Bill was a god to us. He wasn’t as well known at the time as the ‘Voice of Rugby’, because he only covered the four international matches a year, plus tour games. There was no Rugby Special at the time, but he was actively involved in all the schools, and the amount of work which he put in was invaluable, both to the town and the club. I remember once, during an international, Bill said: ‘There’s Colin Deans, an old school pupil of mine. If you look closely, you can still see the belt marks!’ Well, somebody wrote to The Scotsman, complaining about that, and Bill phoned me to apologise. But you can’t underestimate how much he did for us. He used to take us country dancing. And teach us about cricket as well as rugby. He was a very big influence on so many people and if you saw him down here, you could understand why he was loved in Hawick.
Deans was a towering presence, somebody who could transform a game and inspire his colleagues with acts of sporting heroism, which gradually earned him near-mythic status. In the South, he slotted into the Hawick ranks, as a Jim Clark or Jackie Stewart might have done in any quality racing car, and this was a time when silverware was the rule rather than the exception at Mansfield Park, and when Deans could walk down his town’s main street and everybody knew his name, even those few people with only a passing interest in rugby. (And they did exist in the Borders.) In these circumstances, it would have been easy and perhaps even understandable if the young star had developed a trace of arrogance or a whiff of look-at-me narcissism, but Deans had never forgotten being left on the sidelines in the early days, and he actually questioned his own abilities when he gained the call from the Scotland selectors, ahead of his debut in 1978.
I suppose I always had this inferiority complex and I never thought I was as good as the newspapers said. Scottish players tend to have this perception – I think it might be the nation in general, not just rugby players – that we’re not as good [as other countries]. Anyway, it said on the invitation that I had to indicate if I was unavailable or unfit for selection [against France in the opening game of the Five Nations Championship], and I remember wondering if this was a get-out clause for if you didn’t think that you were worthy to represent your country. So, I sat down and asked myself: ‘Right, am I really fit to play for Scotland?’ Then I thought: ‘Aye, let’s give it a go!’
These words might surprise many people, but these indomitable Borderers were so used to keeping their feet on the ground that they rarely became prima donnas. In any case, despite the ferocity of the Hawick juggernaut sweeping away everything in its path on the domestic circuit, the policy of building the Scotland side around a nucleus of Mansfield Park behemoths only had limited success. The likes of Pender, Hogg and Hegarty saw their international careers extinguished in 1978, following a dismal sequence of 13 international matches without a win for the Scots, and even characters of the calibre of Deans and Renwick grew as familiar with disappointment in their country’s cause as they basked in success in the Borders. The decision, which many in the South had opposed, to launch a Scottish club championship in the 1970s eventually bore fruit, but there were slim pickings for the first few years and Deans was one of the few of that golden Hawick generation to endure into the 1980s and progress towards an eventual Lions call-up.
Even then, on what proved an ill-fated trip to New Zealand, the hooker was frustrated, both by the inclusion of Ireland’s Ciaran Fitzgerald – a man who could barely throw the ball straight by the end of the series – and the lack of faith shown in his qualities by those who picked the team. This was not the fault of the coach, Jim Telfer, a proud Borderer who knew all about Deans and the gifts he could bring to the party, but a consequence of the selection process, where Fitzgerald and Lions manager, Willie John McBride, made some peculiar decisions, which not only impacted on Deans, but the peerless John Rutherford, who was only picked for one Test and that out of position at centre.
In short, the Green Machine could rule the roost when they were playing in their homeland, but they held less sway on the international stage. Yet, even if somebody such as Renwick only savoured victory away from Murrayfield twice in his 52-cap span, they provided rugby aficionados with a scrapbook of unforgettable images and vignettes.
As for Hawick, there may be some people who berate the Teris for dwelling in the ‘Land that Time Forgot’ or their ‘Aye-been’ tendencies, but the fact is that their achievements will never be surpassed in Scottish rugby. They created a development system which was the envy of the rest of Scotland, and even today, there are plenty of youngsters performing with distinction from the town, who have sufficient talent and ambition to pursue Test honours and follow in the footsteps of their predecessors. Yet, as Jim Renwick pointed out, the major difference lies in how they will chase these goals.
Scotland’s clubs could have taken their chance when the game turned professional [in 1995], but they didn’t and the SRU went down the district route, so there is no point in crying over spilt milk. I still live down here and I don’t think there is any less passion for rugby among the Border clubs than there was in the past, but you have the situation nowadays where a lot of our young folk have to move to the cities to find work and, once they start playing rugby in Glasgow or Edinburgh, they don’t come back as often as they used to and it is just a fact of life that we have economic problems in the South.
Some people find it hard to get to grips with the modern game, and even more difficult to accept that Hawick is now just a stepping stone for the best players, before they leave the town in search of a professional contract, either with the SRU or in England. But I am not too pessimistic about the future, because I know there are still lots of hard-working folk doing their best around Mansfield Park and these things tend to be cyclical. I was at the Common Riding [in June of 2011] and I met up with a lot of the old crowd, and, of course, we chewed the fat about the past, and talked about how things are at the moment. And, what came across to me was that people still really, really love their rugby in Hawick and I have no fears on that score. It is how we help the clubs which is important, because they are Scottish rugby and nobody should ever forget that. And recently I have sensed they are springing back into good health and are showing the sport is still alive and well at the grass roots. So who knows what will happen from here?
Renwick is one of his country’s finest rugby performers. He is also as much in love with Hawick as he was in the early days when he and Colin Telfer were vying for the stand-off berth at Mansfield Park, and he talks vividly of refulgent afternoons, such as kicking that long-range penalty to sink Gala in the last act of an enthralling, title-deciding contest at Netherdale in 1982. That kick secured another championship for his team and although they lost out to their maroon-clad rivals in the following season, the Teris rebounded with typical effervescence to maintain a stranglehold on the national title for the next four years, as the struggle continued between the rival organisations in their region.
That is how it has always been in the Borders and when one examines the fashion in which rugby captured the imagination of so many diverse individuals, we have to be grateful for the tireless exertions of those in the Hawick Hall of Fame, such as McLeod, McLaren, Grant, Charters and the raft of wonderful players who were inspired to take up the game from the 1950s onwards. Ultimately, the marauding feats of these characters might cast an imposing shadow over the present Hawick generation, but men such as Renwick and Deans are not stuck in a time warp; they appreciate that they were privileged to enjoy so much success, but that the focus must now switch to the men and women who are doing their utmost to maintain the tradition and keep the Green Machine on the road.