David Lord would kick off every email to The Rugby Paper during the last years of his life in the down-to-earth manner of a fair dinkum Aussie: “Mate, I’m still above ground but only just…’’
The man who set out to do for rugby’s impoverished amateurs what Kerry Packer had done a few years earlier for the underpaid professionals of Test cricket found himself in a fight far more serious than his slugfeast with a horrified Union Establishment.
The medical bulletins spanned a period when Lord’s operation for skin cancer – ‘my own bloody fault for not wearing a hat’ – rose to five in as many year...