Test your knowledge of the toughest rugby players with this WalesOnline quiz!
1. I feel there’s a certain nobility to my nickname. I’m as fiery as the furnaces I used to tend in the steelworks. I was a hooker in the invincible Lions pack on the South Africa tour of 1974, when the Springboks had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the scrums.
2. I’m no ordinary back. Remember my clenched-fist salute after my try-saving hit on France’s Gourdon in the 1976 Grand Slam game?
3. I’m one of the most destructive tacklers to pull on a Welsh jersey - and a wrecking ball in attack. My thundering run that smashed South African prop Os du Randt to the deck in Durban in 1997 will forever be part of Lions folklore.
4. Not even a broken neck could stop me. Despite being told I’d never play again, I was back at scrum-half for Pooler within a year. And, to think, I only earned one cap.
5. A farm accident that almost severed my left wrist should have ended my propping career - but I returned as fit as ever to Neath.
6. I was dubbed “The Iron Man” by the Kiwis after the 1950 Lions tour of New Zealand. I even held Rocky Marciano to a draw in an amateur boxing match in 1943.
7. I played rugby on the edge and sometimes beyond it as No 8, as Ian Gough learned to his cost on one night in Ebbw Vale. I had time with some men in black and also a stint at 13-a-side. My punch-up with prop Stuart Evans is the stuff of shady legend.
8. I’m one of the last miners to play for Wales, having rafted away at the rugby coal-face for over a decade. As a mighty scrummaging hooker, I served a fair few bans in my early days and was sent off against South Africa in 1995. I spent a lot of time by the seaside where I tried to be whiter than white.
9. I made my name as Welsh rugby’s warrior prince and I became one of the most loved figures in Welsh rugby but I left my mark on plenty of opponents out on the Park with my crash-ball carrying and bone-shaking tackling in the centre.
10. I was born and raised in New Zealand but became a Sardis Road legend. I, too, was a real warrior, famous for my part in the Battle of Brive and THAT tackle on Bath's Andy Robinson.
11. A fellow prop described me as a “real hard nut”. I was one of the world’s greatest tight-heads and won a remarkable 12 test caps for the Lions.
12. I was a rock in the scrum and nicknamed “The Enforcer”. After becoming a Test Lion at 21, I spent six years in the no-prisoners world of league.
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