THE WILD SIDE
FROM THEIR first trip to South Africa in 1891 to the dozen tours that followed over the next century and more, the Lions versus the Springboks has carried a magic with it at every step. Great Tests, immortal players, disgraceful violence, controversial trips in the apartheid era – it’s been an odyssey like no other in the history of sport.
You could pick a hundred key moments and you’d still be leaving out dozens more. When Warren Gatland takes his players south there will be 130 years of history behind them – the good, the bad, the brutal and the enduringly compelling.
Turn over for ten tales from past tours…
WRECKERS AND KIPPERS~1968
In 1968 there was a group called the Wreckers and a group called the Kippers. The Wreckers were the boozed-up players who enjoyed destroying things amid a drunken rampage. The Kippers were the ones who were in their beds when all this nonsense was going on. The weird thing is that one of the chief wreckers was David Brooks, the tour manager. “He was the proverbial guy who never grew up,” said Ireland’s Ronnie Dawson.
The writer JBG Thomas takes up the story: “After an early breakfast there was a rush to the news stall at the railway station to obtain copies of the Jo’burg Sunday Times. Even VIPs on holidays were in the hunt for the sensational news. When we got the paper, there it was, across the
