Graham Price at 70 - the Wales and Lions legend who could have ended up being a Springbok!

Graham Price stands as one of the true greats of Welsh rugby. Here is a man who started 12 successive Tests for the Lions on three separate tours, as well as winning two Grand Slams and four Triple Crowns with Wales.

Yet, if fate had taken a hand, he could have ended up playing for the Springboks! All will be explained on that front as we go along. As it turned out, he was to win 41 Welsh caps at tighthead prop between 1975 and 1983, the bulk of them as part of the legendary Pontypool front row, alongside Charlie Faulkner and Bobby Windsor.

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He kept on playing for his beloved Pontypool into his late thirties and has remained closely involved in the game as columnist for Wales On Sunday, a role he has filled for some 35 years now. So there could be few more fitting candidates to receive a Lifetime Achievement award from the Welsh Rugby Writers Association. Price was presented with that trophy this week by his old pal Eddie Butler, following in the footsteps of previous recipients like John Dawes, Clive Rowlands and John Taylor.

Now 70, he has some tale to tell when we catch up for a chat, starting with how was it that he was born in Moscar, Egypt?

“My father, Eric, was in the services,” he explains. “He had joined the army at the outbreak of WWII in 1939 and then stayed in after the war. He was posted in Egypt and my mother and sister were out there with him. So that’s where I was born.

“During the war, he actually served in East Africa and he didn’t really want to come back to the UK. He wanted to stay over there and settle somewhere like Cape Town. So it could have been Graham Price ending up