Brendan Gallagher: ‘Bish’ is an angel with a dirty face

Thirty years ago this month David Bishop fished a small bottle of water from his bag and found a quiet corner of the Wales changing room at the old Arms Park where the singing was already underway.  Kneeling down he sprinkled the Holy water from Lourdes on his hands, like a priest preparing for communion, before solemnly making the sign of the cross with his right hand. He then reached inside the collar of his Wales shirt to rub some water on his neck before finally saying a couple of prayers while gently clasping his St Jude pendant. The Patron Saint of lost causes. He wears the pendant still.
His pre-match ritual over, Bishop quickly re-joined the shouting and exhortations of the Wales changing room. Australia’s brilliant Grand Slam side of 1984 lay in wait with Wales subsequently slaughtered up front and losing 28-9 but Bishop made a fine debut in adversity which he crowned with a sensational late try as he juggled to retain possession over the Wallabies line.
It was the only Test try the Wallabies conceded on that European tour and, remarkably, it was also the only time we ever saw Bishop in a senior Wales shirt. Just turned 24, his international career in Union was over before it started.
“You know the film Trading Places? I’m the Eddie Murphy character,” muses Bishop today. “He got to be a stockbroker for a day and I got to be a Wales rugby player for a day. And then they took it away from me. During the week of that Australia Test all the ‘big Five’  – as the selectors liked to be known – came up to me at one stage to say they had been voting for me over the last couple of years.”
Bishop, to my eyes and countless other observers, was the outstanding Welsh rugby talent of his generation, a wondrous one man army of a player who briefly transformed an already highly competitive Pontypool team into world beaters. He was deeply controversial and inspirational in equal measure. In his late teens he had been inside for GBH and later he received a suspended sentence and 11-month rugby ban for punching Newbridge lock Chris Jarman. A hard cat to keep on the porch, he prowled the nightspots of Cardiff incessantly and eventually was very publically made persona non grata by the Welsh set up.
Yet this was also the same David Bishop who won a prestigious Royal Humane Society Award for bravery after rescuing a woman and her child in a swollen River Taff; the miracle man who defied a broken neck to keep on playing; the Welsh patriot who proudly represented his country in four different sports and the darling of the Pontypool faithful whom he never let down.
I’m struggling to remember a single club game in which he didn’t do something extraordinary or unique and there are Test players of household repute, but much less ability, who won 40-50 Tests caps while Bishop was spurned.  If I was picking a side to play for my life tomorrow he would be there somewhere although Gareth Edwards would take precedence at scrum-half. Just.  Bishop was pure box office and I can still hear the collective sigh of relief around a packed Pontypool Park when his name was read out on the Tannoy minutes before kick-off.  He did sometimes leaves it very late indeed before arriving but if ‘The Bish’  was on board all dreams were permissible.
In two or three seasons of concerted Bishop watching I only spotted one technical weakness. He could spin pass left to right well enough when Pooler were in the box seat but under extreme pressure he did that thing when you turn your back to the line-out or back of the scrum and make it a much easier right to left transfer. Even then though he was cute and used it to his advantage. The opposition would greedily lick their lips and line up Bishop for some ‘treatment’ when they saw him shape for such a pass. Except he would counter by throwing an outrageous dummy and steam past them on their weak inside shoulders. I must have seen the ‘Bish’ score 10-15 tries like that.

Today he is a doting grandfather who helps run an Eco friendly heating business that specialises in solar panels. Still conjuring something out of fresh air.  He doesn’t really do Press – too many bad memories and experiences – but in a moment of weakness he agreed to meet for a yarn at his favourite Italian restaurant, Valantino’s in Cardiff and there is a lot of ground to cover. Born on Halloween’s Day 1960, there has been a large element of trick or treat to his life.
“If I ever do a book I would call it Angel with a Dirty face from the James Cagney gangster movie,” says Bishop. “ I love that film. It’s about two great mates from a rough part of town. Once becomes a priest and one ends up being executed for his crimes. It always makes me cry.
“I quite liked the other side of the fence you know – being a bit of a celebrity and playboy – and I know to a certain extent I didn’t help myself.  I was a creature of the night, in fact I was damn near nocturnal at one stage. I seemed to operate on a different body clock. I would be out every night of every week and that included before games, in fact especially before a game. Nightclubs, pubs, dives, the Casino, just hanging out in Cardiff. I would usually finish with something to eat at Patrice’s in Roath about 4am. Then I would head for home, crash out, wake up, shower, Mum would bless me and I would head for the game.
“It was all a bit crazy but it was basically an amateur game – it was my life – and my one saving grace was that I wasn’t really a drinker and I wasn’t tipping huge amounts of booze down my throat. The Pooler boys will tell you I got pissed on a couple of ciders, and in fact I didn’t really learn to drink properly until I was 40. Also contrary to what everybody thought I wasn’t doing drugs.
“I remember one all nighter before a big game at Leicester one Easter. I was a man barely alive when the team coach picked me up. Jeff Squire and Pricey weren’t amused and told Ray Prosser time and time again I was not fit to play. Pross knew the score alright but had faith in my powers of recovery. I slept all the way to Welford Road where they stood me in the cold shower for five minutes and eventually just before kick-off I started to come around. The adrenaline kicked in and I had one of my best ever games. We took their ground record. A clinical SAS job the papers said. If only they knew.
“It’s amazing what the body can cope with. We toured North America one year and I decided I was going to head for New York for four days with Peter Lewis, our full-back. I spent the entire time partying with Genesis and Hall and Oats. You can imagine what state I was in. We were playing in Niagara Falls and somehow we got back to Buffalo before our money ran out. No problems. We jumped in a taxi and it cost Pooler $200 when we arrived but the kitty was overflowing that year and they paid up. They needed their scrum-half back. I had a stormer.
“I hated getting to matches early anyway, all that small talk, flicking through the programme and staring into space. I liked to get there as late as possible. Quick prayer and Holy Water in the corner, last on the massage table, last out of the tunnel and still working on my strapping on my strapping when we ran out.”
The dramas started coming thick and fast early in Bishop’s career, on and off the field. By the age of 17 the most outstanding youngster on the Cardiff books was already on bail awaiting sentencing for GBH when he made the headlines with a selfless act of courage.
“I was on the phone at my Dad’s pub the Tudor down by the River waiting to go to Cardiff training when my mate Phil Ford ran in. Phil is a non-swimmer and shouted that a woman and her child were in trouble having fallen into the Taff which was in spate. It was just a stone’s throw away and we sprinted over and there she was clinging on for dear life on the edge. There was a few people around and a lot of shouting but nobody seemed to be doing anything.
“She was trying to keep to the bank and was clinging onto a baby and a pram so I got down by the side of her in the water, grabbed the baby and literally rugby passed the poor mite to Phil on the path. Then the woman began to slip away – the river flow was so strong and the water was freezing – and as she struggled she pulled me under. I had to push her off but then grabbed her long hair and hauled her in. It must have hurt like hell but I got her to the bank.
“To be honest I just went back to the pub to towel off and warm up and then headed straight for Cardiff training. Ten minutes into training a Police panda arrived with lights flashing and of course I got all sorts of stick from the lads. What have you done now. But actually they had come to check I was ok and thank me for my efforts. Fast forward a bit and I was in Aylesbury gaol doing my time and the warden called for me. He said I had been nominated for the Royal Humane Society for bravery and although normally these things were handed out by a Royal at the Palace we would have to make do with his prison office. In all honesty I didn’t do that much, it was a bit embarrassing.”
The broken neck? That happened soon after he had come out of prison – “ripped, stripped and mean as xxxx” to use his own expression – and had been lured to Pontypool by Pross minutes after the Pooler coach had witnessed him put in an MOM performance in Ebbw Vale’s 46-9 defeat to Pooler. Bishop had previously told Newport‘s Charlie Faulkner that he would move down to Rodney Parade but Prosser went to work. “You had three legs out there to every other buggar’s one, come and join us at Pooler, Bish, not those effing black and amber bastards.”  The deal was done.
A couple of weeks late he broke his neck  – C3-C4 – at Aberavon although for the first fortnight it was diagnosed as ruptured neck ligaments. Eventually they had to drill into his skull while he was conscious to fit a brace and then it was an eight hour operation to take a chunk of bone from his hip and wedge it in his neck. One specialist told him there were two things he would never do again. Play rugby and dive off the 10m board at the Empire Pool Cardiff. The first thing Bishop did nine months later when he declared himself healed was to dive off the high board, followed a day later by a guest appearance at the Aberavon Sevens.
“I always knew I would play again, I never contemplated the alternative, although I had to get Doc Roberts, a friend of my Dad from Glamorgan Wanderers days to sign an insurance certificate. He was on my side but he warned me: ‘If this happens again David you won’t just be paralysed you will die. Do you understand? Good, well sign here on the dotted line and good luck son.’
“When it came to the comeback Dad was distraught and wouldn’t talk to me for a couple of weeks but Mum knew I needed to play to keep my sanity really. We were a strong Catholic family and the first thing she did was march me off down to Father Maguire’s for a blessing. Then she would get this Holy Water from Lourdes and bless me every time I left the house to play.
“And I took some Holy Water everywhere I went and developed my own routine. I only felt fear once – and just for a second – when Pooler next played at Aberavon. After that I was sound as a pound although down in the New Zealand with the Lions Rugby League team I once left the water back at the hotel. Mal Reilly suggested we use tap water but I gave him an old fashioned look and somebody went rushing back to my room for me. All was well.”
And the Jarman affair in 1985 when he was going head to head with Robert Jones for the Wales spot at scrum-half? “Did I do wrong? Yes, I punched a guy in the face. I caught him with really good short dig although it didn’t break his jaw like some claimed. We didn’t know this guy Jarman, he was new, but he was really putting it about and had already clipped our fly-half Mike Goldsworthy. For some reason our pack hadn’t sorted him out so I said I would deal with him. And I did.
“But the reaction was out of all proportion and remember there was no video or footage, no citings, what followed was all based on various people’s accounts of what they saw or thought they saw. You would have thought I was Jack the Ripper. All the time the civil case rumbled on Wales wouldn’t look at me and then on top of that I got an 11-month rugby ban. In fact I couldn’t even go on a public park. All for a punch!
“It absolutely killed me as a Rugby Union in player. When I was in gaol I remember raging when Wales picked Mark Douglas at scrum-half thinking it could have been me. And then throughout the Jarman case  and  then the ban I had to watch Robert Jones take ‘my’ place. Not being able to play in the 1987 World Cup nearly destroyed me. Going North was the only option after that.”
Bishop finally moved to Hull KR in 1988, after 171 tries in 240 first team appearances for Pontypool, although not before a comical false start with St Helens, having to cancel his signing Press conference when he failed their medical – they were completely unaware of his neck injury apparently.  Dragging himself away from Pooler was tough but leaving Prosser was the hardest bit of all.
“I’m not always sure how popular I was at Pooler among some of the players although I got on brilliantly with some like Bobby Windsor and snooty (Eddie Butler). But I was Cardiff and a bit flash and when it came to Pross I was clearly teacher’s pet.
“Our pre-seasons were brutal with most sessions ending with the grotto run.  “There’s a bucketful of effing gold up on that effing summit,” Pross would bark at us.  Not for me there bloody wasn’t. I used to play Sevens all August, I had boxed for Wales and still worked out. I played baseball for Wales. I was fit in my own way.
“Pross I’m a Derby runner, not a bloody Grand National hack,” I pleaded. “There’s no bloody gold for me on the grotto just a bucketful of puke and I don’t fancy that at all.” Pross backed down and had me spotting on the sides, reporting any shirkers taking shortcuts. Like I say teacher’s pet.
“I love Pross dearly. He’s 86 now and we still talk regularly. He did so much for me and I’m not sure I did enough in return.  He understood me, he backed me warts and all. And when you think about it there’s no greater compliment or privilege than that.”