Peter Jackson: The day Big Bad Jim forgot his old pals act
Jim Mills and Mike Nicholas caused enough mayhem to be sent off at least 35 times, which makes them rugby‘s reincarnation of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. In an era when just about anything went, when the Australians gloried in ‘Going The Biff,’ Mills even managed the Herculean task of out-biffing his scrapping compatriot.
Each, naturally enough, had a season ticket to the monthly meetings of the Rugby League’s disciplinary committee. “They used to keep me and Big Jim back until last because our files were bigger than the others,” Nicholas says. “They used to bring them in on a trolley…”
Nicholas, ex-Aberavon, had 15 early baths during 11 years with Warrington, Cardiff City Blue Dragons and Wales from 1972 to 1983. Mills, ex-Cardiff, had 20 during a career with Halifax, Salford, Bradford Northern, North Sydney, Widnes, Warrington, Wales and Great Britain from 1965 to 1980.
He thinks it’s 20 but cannot be certain although there is no denying that one of the 20 was for whacking Nicholas, in the 1979 John Player Trophy final at St. Helens. When I wrote a story some years back putting the figure at 21, Big Bad Jim was on the phone the next morning, complaining.
“Get your facts right, son,” he said. “You say I was sent off 21 times but you’ve got it wrong. It was 22. And 17 of those were cases of mistaken identity…”
Mills laughs at the absurdity of it. “I think it’s around 20,” he says with the air of a man who cannot be sure that he hasn’t lost one or two along the way. “I was sent off six times playing for North Sydney and that was just in two and a half years. But, as a forward, unless you were sent off once a year in those days, there was something wrong with you.”
He had more reason than usual to greet the dawn of the New Year. For the first time since crossing the rugby Rubicon more than half a century ago, Mills has learnt that he is no longer a prophet without honour in his own land.
A dinner is to be given in his honour in Cardiff at the end of the season. The Welsh Charitables RFC, who have feted the great and the good of the game for worthy causes under the direction of the dynamic David Power, are to devote this year’s event to Mills under the banner: “Charity dinner with a legend.”
It will be an occasion very different to one he experienced in Cardiff shortly after he left the city as an out-of-work 20-year-old, his employment problem solved by a £4,000 transfer to Halifax.
“There was only one incident which upset me a bit,” he said. “We’d played an exhibition match at Ebbw Vale and three or four us were in the Athletic club at the Arms Park having a quiet beer.
“Danny Davies, who was then one of the leading officials at Cardiff Rugby club, came up to us. ‘Hello, Jim,’ he says. ‘I hope you don’t mind but you have to leave the premises’.
“So I said to him, ‘what do you mean, leave the premises?’
‘“Well,’ he says, ‘you are a professional and we are not allowed to have professionals in here’.”
“Rather than make a fuss, we were about to go but Rhys (RH) Williams (the Cardiff, Wales and Lions‘ second row forward) overheard the conversation. He says to us, ‘you stay here’.
“Ever since then I was always welcomed back with open arms but to be given a dinner in my honour is something I never dreamt of. I’m over the moon about it.
“When I think of all the great players that the Welsh Charitables have honoured and how many more great players they have yet to honour, it makes me feel very honoured. It’s a wonderful recognition.”
Now 72, Mills has retired after some 30 years running a nightclub in his adopted Widnes. While he is man enough to acknowledge the worst incident of his career, the stamping of New Zealand prop John Greengrass at Swansea in 1975, as a “moment of madness”, the fans love him for the blood-and-thunder of his game.
Nobody was guaranteed immunity, as another Welsh international, Eddie Cunningham, of St Helens and Great Britain fame, discovered to his cost.
“Eddie, myself and Mike Nicholas came back together with Wales from Australia in 1975,” Mills says. “I said to the others, ‘we are all blood brothers from now on, when we’re on opposite sides we will always play fair because we are brothers’.”
It lasted until Widnes met St Helens early the following season in a Floodlit Trophy match. “Eddie tried to pinch the ball from me so I gave him a little tap with my head and cut him above the eye. He didn’t speak in the bar after the game so I said, ‘what’s up, Eddie?’
“He was annoyed because I’d said we were all blood brothers and wouldn’t hurt each other. Then he said, ‘look at my head’.
“And I told him, ‘Eddie, I never said it extended to cup ties’….”
