Welsh rugby has lost its biggest and greatest fan. Grav loved the team and his enthusiasm was unrivalled. If you could get a group of players together who believed in themselves as much as Ray believed in the Wales team then we would be unbeatable.
My favourite story about him goes back to when we played together on the 1980 Lions tour. It was after a game in Transvaal. Grav discovered ‘Captain Morgan’ rum for the first time, a drink he continued to have a soft spot for down the years.
It was the after-match reception and the ‘gentle giant’ was starting to get a bit too lively, so Syd Millar asked me and a couple of the other boys to take him back to his room. Grav played us up a treat. He wouldn’t get into bed until we put his pyjamas on for him … and then he wanted us to tell him a story! We put up with all this for a while, but in the end we were begging him to go to sleep.
It’s a funny memory and we never told him how we finally got him to quieten down. But, once he was asleep, we were still a little worried about him, whether he’d be ill in the night or something, so we paid one of the porters to sit in his room and keep an eye on him.
When Grav came down to breakfast the next morning we were all eager to see what state he was in. He complained of a sore jaw. We didn’t let on we knew why and just told him he’d fallen over on his way home – nothing to do with the scuffles as we tried to get this huge bulk of a man into his bed!
We found it all hilarious, but then he launched into an animated story about a thief that had come to his room in the night. This coincided with a time when a few of the boys had been getting Lions pin badges nicked out of their rooms as mementos and Gravs told us not to worry and it wouldn’t be happening again.
He’d woken up in the night, found the thief – which we all realised was the porter we’d paid to look after him – proceeded to give the poor guy a few whacks and, still in his pyjamas, ran him out of the hotel!
That was Grav for you, an integral part of any team in both his sporting and working life and the kind of person everyone wanted to be around. He’d run through a brick wall for you if he thought it would help and he had a fair amount of skill about him as a player as well.
He was our national sport’s greatest ambassador on a world-wide scale, a true legend, a true friend who is irreplaceable and will be sadly missed by all who knew him, and all who knew of him.
