Jackson column: Port Talbot wizardry fizzes on in Regan Grace

By giving Leeds the run-around at Headingley last Sunday, Regan Grace did more than ensure his handiwork would be whizzing across the world on social media all week.

His wondrous hat-trick adds a fizzing new chapter to a history book like no other: the unique relationship between a town smack in the middle of the Welsh Rugby Union belt and three in Lancashire renown for 40 victorious Challenge Cup finals.

Port Talbot produces more than steel and movie stars. Its nomadic  rugby tribe have been doing famous things Up North almost since the Great Schism of 1895.

At various stages for most of the 20th century, crowds on either side of the Pennines began to understand why Port Talbot’s major club, Aberavon, had been nicknamed ‘The Wizards’. Grace’s bewitching mixture of body-swerving Olympian pace and gymnastics for St Helens has shown a new generation of Super League audiences that Port Talbot still dabbles in wizardry.

Nobody used it to more devastating effect than a wing who began his working life as a shunter in the steelworks. Johnny Ring scored tries on a scale vast enough to suggest that on occasions he must have made some of those standing between him and the goal line vanish in a puff of smoke.

His 76 in a season for Aberavon in 1919-20 and 62 for Wigan in 1925-26 will stand forever in each code. His pre-war total in League may have been eclipsed by Billy Boston post-war but not even Boston could match Ring’s strike rate of more than one try per game over ten seasons for Wigan, 368 in 331 games.

He never needed reminding of any numbers, as illustrated by what happened when the Warrington team bus pulled up at Central Park for a match against Wigan in the early Seventies.  At that time, The Wire boasted five from Aberavon: Bobby Wanbon, Mike Nicholas, Francis Reynolds, Clive Jones and Dennis Curling.

An elderly man waits on the pavement for the gladiators to disembark.  Nicholas, a raconteur par excellence who dips into his treasure trove of yarns and spins them in much the same rumbustious way he played the game in between 15 sendings-off, is first off the bus.

Elderly man: “Can you point out the Aberavon boys?”

“I’m Mike Nicholas. I’m one of them. How can I help you?”

Elderly man: “Is Dennis Curling here?”

“Yes. He’s at the back of the bus. Be out now in a minute.”

Curling, the scorer of seven tries in a Welsh Cup match against Nantymoel shortly before leaving Aberavon, emerges.

“Dennis, this gentleman wants to talk to you.”

Elderly man: “Hello, Dennis. May I congratulate you on your seven tries.  I don’t know whether you’ve heard of me. My name is Johnny Ring and I did it three times for Aberavon, against Cardiff, Newport and Swansea.”

Whereupon, according to Nicholas, the old master went his separate way, satisfied at having made his point, that his seven were against mighty opponents, not junior clubs like Nantymoel.

Ring, who died some ten years later in 1984 just before his 83rd birthday, appreciated the value of what he had done, even if the tight-fisted Wigan directors did not. In December 1931, they refused to grant him a benefit match to mark ten years during which Ring scored his 368 tries. The board, acutely aware that it took all of £800 to tempt their man out of Port Talbot, decided that ‘he had been well rewarded since’.

Ring, who spent some of the £800 on medical fees to cure his then 14-year-old sister of a leg disability, asked for a transfer whereupon Wigan compounded the felony by flogging him to Rochdale Hornets for £100.  After retirement, he qualified as a physiotherapist and spent the rest of his days in Wigan.

In the immediate post-war era, Port Talbot’s influence on League extended to Australia.  Arthur Bassett, ex-Aberavon, delivered a hat-trick of tries for Great Britain in the second Test against Australia during the historic tour of 1946 named after their imposing mode of transport, the aircraft carrier HMS Indomitable.

Two years later, as if keen to even up the score, Port Talbot sent one of their more prodigious sons off on the same long voyage. Barely ten years after emigrating with his family at the age of 14, Keith Barnes was captaining Australia, luxuriating in a lifelong nickname which said everything about his goalkicking, Golden Boots.

When Barnes left Margam, Nicholas was a two-year-old growing up in the same suburb of Port Talbot under the impression that ‘everyone had a 300ft blast furnace at the bottom of their garden’.

Nicholas, whose acute sense of history enhances his presidency of the Welsh Rugby League, bumped into Barnes at that World Cup.  “Well, well,” he said to Barnes. “Just fancy that – two boys from Margam managing countries 10,000 miles apart.”

For any League club, signing a Wizard meant running the risk the player concerned would make himself disappear.  Precisely such a fate befell one Aberavon wing during the Thirties. His name was Len Madden.

“Len was a Powderhall sprinter,  the fastest white man of his day,” says Nicholas the historian. “In four trial matches for Leeds, he scored eight tries. Then he disappeared.

“Leeds were frantic and were even more frantic when someone told them: ‘Len’s gone for another trial.’    They feared the worst: ‘Who’s trying to sign him?’

“Then their informant told them: ‘This trial is liable to put him away for a while. It’s at the Crown Court….”’

Had he been around to witness Regan’s coup de grace, Johnny Ring would surely have waited for the St Helens coach to arrive for today’s home match against Castleford so he could tell the young man, as one Aberavon Harlequin to another:

“Son, I scored many hat-tricks but none to match the one you got last week. Very well played, young man.”

PETER JACKSON