When I moved back to Glanymor I started going to the rugby. This was something that I had hardly ever done during my earlier years there. I’d never seen the appeal of the oval ball. I couldn’t catch it. I couldn’t kick it. You couldn’t play with it on your own. At school rugby was the yardstick and I was no good. I hated the rough and tumble, the contact and the reliance on others to shape your fortunes.
Wilf, the man who acted as the father in the family that my mother had assembled, didn’t care for rugby either. We would sit silently in the tin roofed barbershop while the silver stubble necked old men discussed the ‘football’. My grandfather, Wilf told me, had shared his indifference, referring to the game as ‘pants and whistle’.
Wilf’s mate Ted, who used to work on the open cast with him, had ‘gone north’. Ted was a monumental bewhiskered humanoid who visited us in the summer, wearing a leather jacket on even the warmest of days, a brown cigarette permanently welded to his bolt like knuckles. Kids ran after his Triumph Stag as he drove along our street, but here, he pointed out, they just followed him without knowing who he was. I remember my mother watching him once on Floodlit Rugby League when Wilf was out, which I found quite strange. Ted was sent off, and she switched back to ITV.
‘Football’ was Ted’s job. He spoke about it in the same way that Wilf talked about the open cast; the practical jokes and who said what to whom and so on. He never talked about the game itself.
On Saturday afternoons I would hear the occasional bursts of noise and a shrill whistle followed by a cheer or jeer drifting from the Parc, but I stayed away. Once I went and was pinned to the ground behind the dead ball line and filled in by two fat denim clad boys from ‘away’. Bloody nosed I ran home past the crowd who were indifferent to my suffering.
Now back in Glanymor I was struck by how central the ‘Parc’ was to the town. The corrugated roof of the pathetic stand was now painted in black and amber stripes with Glanymor RFC in man sized white letters.
The men who mattered still leaned on the cast iron railings opposite the ‘stand’:
Pug faced Gary Lock who smashed up the Boat Club with a baseball bat when someone took the piss out of his son; Gwyn 18 Months who had half his ear chewed off one Bank Holiday in Porthcawl; Ted, mad, addled and arthritic, his curls now white, leaning on crutches , his kneecaps, apparently ‘the size of cabbages’.
There were, now, things I’d never thought I’d see in the Parc, modest advertising hoardings, a hot dog van, Tongans and loudspeaker announcements and music just like the Millstad.
Pre match warm ups and drills with tackle bags and isotonic drinks as the tannoy played The Stereophonics against the breeze. Old black and amber hoops distorted and obliterated by a patchwork of advertisements.
I still felt excluded by the banter of the ageing ‘boys’ and the seriousness of the more concerned onlookers. Parochial paranoia and grudge simmered.
Elwyn Rees, sixty, grey haired, bespectacled in a skin tight pink Ospreys shirt told me that when Shawn Morrison went straight from Glanymor to Warrington that they took sacks of sand from Glanymor beach up there for him to kick from.
Often the visiting team would carry the name of one of the giants, the founding fathers of Welsh Rugby, who we used to watch on telly playing the All Blacks, with seven Welsh internationals in the team and crowds of twenty thousand. These clubs had been laid low by the coming of the regions, playing in shitty little parks like Glanymor Parc with one old stand and about 100 people watching.
Week in week out I went, paid my fiver and learned the script, leaning on the iron rail with its 100 coats of black paint.
I watched the teams attempt to get rid of the ball, hoofing it for about an hour, punctuated by twenty minutes of re set scrums and outside halves with permatans and sixty quid haircuts.
There was always a lot of talk about some bloke called David who had signed for the Scarlets, but something had gone awry.
The last game of that season was played on a boiling Saturday in May, and the next day they found this David hanging from the crossbar of the goalposts in the Parc, at the end where Shawn Morrison had kicked the penalty that knocked Pontypool out of the cup in 1986. Or was it 1987…
Walker (2011)
© Walker & Jones 2011
