What Goes on Tour Stays on Tour by Brian Moore

Author:Brian Moore
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780857202550
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7

‘I’d Like a Superior Suite with an Ocean View’

Officially, it became known as ‘The Invincibles’ Tour’. Unofficially, it was dubbed, by those who knew, ‘The Wreckers’ Tour’. The 1974 Lions tour to South Africa may have contained some of the game’s legends – players such as Willie John McBride, Gareth Edwards and J.P.R. Williams; it may have gone down in rugby history as hugely successful – 21 out of 22 games were won, the Lions won the series and were unbeaten in the Tests. However, some of the managers of the hotels that the team stayed in along the way might remember the tour for slightly different reasons. The team basically had ‘wreckers’ who used to see how many hotel doors they could break or wrench off their hinges. Mind you, it wasn’t always done on purpose and it wasn’t always doors; sometimes it was beds, tables, chairs, whatever.

In one hotel after the Lions’ victory in the second Test earlier that day, spirits had clearly been set alight and the alcohol flowed. As celebrations spiralled out of control later that night, Welsh forward Tommy David’s bed ended up being thrown out of a window. Meanwhile, down on the ground below, chaos reigned, because someone had had the bright idea of setting fire to some empty boxes, causing Bobby Windsor, the hooker, to rip the fire extinguisher from the wall to try to extinguish the blaze. As the hotel manager failed to appear grateful enough that disaster had been averted, he too got a hosing down for good measure. Eventually, at three in the morning, Willie John McBride, the team captain, was summoned down from his room to sort out the situation. He turned up in what was left of the hotel lobby, which had also had the full Lions celebration treatment. He was clad only in his underpants, but clutching his pipe, without which he was rarely seen when he was not playing rugby. The manager was by now incandescent with rage. ‘What seems to be the matter?’ asked Willie John, very calmly, with his unmistakably Irish accent. Amid his ranting, the manager informed him that things had gone much too far and that the police were now being called. At this, the captain reflected a little, took a few slow puffs of his pipe, and enquired, ‘Will there be many of them?’

Before things started to get more serious within the England set-up in the late 1980s, two tours still displayed the full extent of amateurism. As well as the infamous trip to South Africa in 1984, where outrageous behaviour seemed to attract amused reactions rather than sanctions, England went on a ‘spreading the game’ tour of North America, and because the rugby was relatively unchallenging, they took full advantage of any opportunity to have a virtual playing holiday. The behaviour in the hotels was regularly off the scale, it seems, and the whole tour has always sounded pretty rock and roll to me, only with alcohol in place of drugs.

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