They say that no person is bigger than the game, but Vernon Pugh, who died last Thursday, came pretty close to bucking the cliché. For the best part of a decade, he truly was lord and master of rugby union.
As chairman of the International Rugby Board (IRB), he delivered the game into professionalism and planned its survival thereafter, he expanded the Five Nations to embrace Italy, he carried rugby into China and he forged the Heineken Cup and Parker Pen Shield in Europe.
He was a mover and a shaker in a sport that did not like to move and hated being shaken. Thus, along the way, he made enemies. But nobody ever laid a finger on him. The lawyer in him approved of his track record in the chambers of rugby politics, but I think the great player that he never really was loved it even more.
For one so unmarked by years in a contact sport — and the political side of his rugby was just as brutal as the field of play — it is difficult to take in that he could be claimed so abruptly by cancer.
He first rose to rugby prominence as an investigator into the 1989 rebel Welsh tour to South Africa. His critical report paved the way for a 1993 vote of no confidence in the Welsh Rugby Union and for his appointment as chairman of the same body.
He did not stay long in his own back yard. And no sooner had he gone on to higher office with the IRB than he was involved in the biggest threat to the game in 100 years. The southern-hemisphere countries who ruled the playing side of rugby — Australia, New Zealand and South Africa — declared to the new chairman of the world authority that immediately after the World Cup of 1995 they would be playing professional rugby. It was a done deal. Not even Pugh could negotiate a way out of that.
But he avoided schism by pronouncing the game ‘open†with immediate effect everywhere. Professional rugby was born and we have been living with the consequences of that decision ever since.
The owners of the clubs in Wales and then England railed against Pugh as he refused to grant to them the commercial autonomy they felt they needed to run the new game. Tycoons, such as Rupert Murdoch, whose satellite channels were to fund the new Super 12 and Tri Nations tournaments, had laid one trap for him in 1995, and he would not fall into another. He would cede to them no more control of his game.
It was a kind of revenge. As was the decision to take the World Cup of 2003 away from New Zealand. ‘Clean†stadiums was the reason cited for making Australia sole host, but this was also personal between Pugh and the Kiwis. Their subsequent abuse of him — they called him ‘a small-time town-planner†— revealed just how personal. And the immediate retraction was clearer evidence of how risky it was to mess with a grand-scale conveyancer.
He always said he wanted to devote more time to his land law. But this may have been a cover for ambitions in a different direction. He was being touted for high office in the International Olympic Committee.
How has he left rugby? Well, the arguments around him rage on. There has been nothing but chaos in Wales ever since he left. He will not be remembered with admiration if his legacy proves just as bankrupt wherever he passed.
It won’t be. China was his mission and who knows what new force will one day be able to trace their rise directly back to him? He had a vision of an expanded game, but equally he leaves the game robust in its old homes, from the Tri to the Six Nations.
Pugh won all his arguments, but there remains much resentment that may quickly rise above the simmering. And much jockeying to fill the power vacuum. He made rugby politics dynamic, and dynamic they are going to remain.
The shape of what comes next will determine the shape of our monument to him. —