The Lion who once roamed the world has only to lift his head to glimpse his happy hunting ground. ‘That’s where I learned rugby,’ says John Beattie looking out the window of his home on to the training grounds of Glasgow Academy.
This is where the son of a planter, brought up in Borneo and Malaysia, found a place for himself in a changing world.
‘I was a misfit as a boy. I didn’t quite fit in when I came to Scotland. But I slotted in playing over there for the school.’
He adjusted to the sport so well that his rise could have induced a nose bleed. Travelling back from a game down south as a 21-year-old, he was lifted to hear Mighty Mouse Ian McLauchlan, the Lions and Scotland prop, tell the cast of travellers that Beattie would be capped for Scotland.
He soon was. He was subsequently picked for the Lions tour to South Africa in 1980 and the expedition to New Zealand in 1983.
Both series were lost and the pain lingers. ‘I didn’t enjoy the tours because they were losing tours. You come back from winning tours as a hero,’ he says.
John Beattie, pictured during the 1980 British and Irish Lions tour to South Africa, tells Mail Sport about his memories of his rugby adventures
Beattie is tackled during the Lions 1983 Tour win over Wanganui in New Zealand
He points over to the academy: ‘As a 17-year-old over there, I listened to Gordon Brown making a speech after he came back from the sensational tour in 1974. He was a hero. My overwhelming feeling was one of sadness when I came back from my tours.’
This, of course, is the reality of the elite sportsperson. Being pummelled by the Springboks and the All Blacks hurts physically and emotionally.
But Beattie, now 67, can reflect on it all from a vantage point of a life well lived, where variety was not just the spice of life but its very marrow.
The British and Irish Lions will embark on their odyssey accompanied by a team of sports scientists, a cadre of analysts and a squadron of coaches. Every need is anticipated and all will be met. They could travel the world on the jetstream of the hype and bluster that a Lion tour now attracts. The players will have lucrative side contracts and an itinerary that details every waking moment.
They are characters who play rugby for a living. They are the outliers who learned of their place on the tour with a televised announcement, filmed when their name was announced on film.
‘It was different for us,’ says Beattie. ‘You were told you were picked by letter and the only unusual thing I can remember is that a tailor came to the camp to measure us for our jackets. Oh, and the drinking culture.’
In the modern media frenzy, it should be noted that Beattie was almost sent home from his first tour because he was writing a column for an evening paper.
There was an admitted innocence in the young man.
Beattie in action during a victory over Eastern Transvaal during the 1980 Tour
John Beattie, Sir Clive Woodward and Derek Quinnell at Johannesburg Airport in 1980
He was venturing to apartheid South Africa with protests ringing in his ears and sent to him by post. ‘I was naive, most of us were. We simply should not have gone,’ he says.
The journey to that moment in 1980 had been brisk.
Beattie tilted at elite rugby with gusto. ‘I had a summer as a scaffolder’s labourer,’ he says of his advent into the senior game. ‘I was also doing power lifting, karate and Olympic wrestling. I was strong and I was quick.’
This is all said without bombast. Beattie has the perspective of someone who played rugby but could never be consumed by it. ‘I had to earn a living,’ he says. A civil engineer, he switched to accountancy.
‘I just wanted to do it,’ he says. ‘I asked a company to take me on. They asked what I would work for. I said eight grand. They offered seven grand and I took it.’ This was 1987. ‘I was married with two kids and working seven days a week.’ His son, Johnnie, followed him into the Scottish rugby team. His daughter, Jen, represented the country at the round ball game.
Beattie, of course, then did commentary for the BBC while writing a column for the Sunday newspaper. His later working life was as a broadcaster, hosting news programmes on radio and television.
‘I was sitting with Bill McLaren in the back of a cab in Rome,’ he says of the peerless commentator whose first visit to Italy was to fight in the Second World War. ‘He told me: “Rugby isn’t the daily grind, it is the escape from the daily grind’’.’
He knows that the lessons learned on the field contributed to his considerable professional success off it. ‘I learned that I could lose and losing was okay,’ he says. ‘You learn to be humble.’
John Beattie in action for the Lions against the Kimberley Fifteen in 1980
He adds: ‘Winning is an artificial high. I was in the team that beat England (Twickenham 1983) and you go back into town and people worship you, but then you go to work on Monday. But when you lose you have to examine yourself. It helps you later in life. You know you are not perfect and you are going to mess up.’
One learns to go on.
The beginning of this process still seems fresh 45 years on. Beattie relates his first impressions of being a Lion with a sense of incredulity that decades have not diminished. It is a crash course of how rugby once was and a glimpse of the chasm that separates the game then with the business now.
‘My fitness test for the 1980 tour was to touch my toes and then have someone clutch my testicles and tell me to cough to find out whether I had a hernia,’ he says.
This less than rigorous initiation was followed by serious drinking. ‘I thought that we were all going to live like monks for 12 weeks but the first team-building exercise was to go out that night and get drunk. I was bemused. Why are we getting drunk?
‘I was sharing a room with a legend I won’t name and I had to undress him and put him to bed. I thought: “This is the Lions?”.’
The squad trained twice a day on tour but matters were rudimentary in 1980 though they had improved when Jim Telfer handed out personal plans for the 1983 tour.
But in South Africa old attitudes would not die. ‘We were told not to drink water during training,’ he says. ‘We were told we were going to do altitude training and ended up drilling on the beach.’
Former rugby star John Beattie now works as a presenter with BBC Scotland and previously hosted The Nine
There is no bitterness in these recollections, only a desire to give a detailed state of the nations. ‘Rugby was very primitive then,’ he says. ‘It’s a different game now. More disciplined, more structured.’
In the two tours, Beattie only played in one Test. ‘I messed up,’ he says of the 1980 tour. ‘I was writing a column and this was frowned on then. I was threatened with being sent home. I stayed on but it hampered my chances.’
He does not say it but being picked for the 1983 tour was a huge achievement.
By then, the forward was operating on a very dodgy knee.
That vulnerability ended his career in 1987 when he was injured at Twickenham. ‘I asked the doc if I would make the World Cup which was four weeks away. He asked: “Do you want a cigarette?” I knew then it was all over.’
Another life of accounts, broadcasting, playing gigs with his band and raising two children then started. It continues.
But the roar of those Lions tours still echoes down the ages.
There was the learning through adversity but also the experiences that informed his life and the friends that gave it so much meaning. He has lost comrades to the vicissitudes of life but still keeps in close contact with others. Fellow Lions came to his wedding.
Memories are still strong. ‘You are a young lad and are flying into Auckland and Johannesburg and being greeted by huge crowds. What do you know of the world? You are suddenly being flown into gold mines or deep sea fishing or eating a barbecue on a farm where the land stretches beyond your sight. You are living under big skies.’
John Beattie, seen with his daughter Jen and son Johnnie, speaks in a measured but powerful way on the joys of rugby
All this is gloriously evocative but he does not avoid the evil he encountered. ‘We went to the townships where corn beer was piped in. We were told this was to keep the black inhabitants manageable. I wasn’t stupid. I knew this was all messed up.’
Gloriously, he was at the World Cup final in 1995 when a Springboks team, inspired by Nelson Mandela and backed by the black population, defeated New Zealand.
There was no such happy ending for Beattie in his Lions tours. ‘You are there to win a test series and if you don’t do that it’s horrendous,’ he says. There are ample compensations, however. ‘When I see someone I toured with or played against, I am instantly back to being 22.’
He is measured but powerful on the joys of rugby. He admits he was once called ‘an old woman’ by some on the International Rugby Board when he made a documentary about the dangers of concussion. But he adds: ‘All the evidence suggests you are better off playing rugby rather than not.’
Longevity predictors now place an emphasis on social circles and maintaining a fit lifestyle, both staples of many former rugby players.
Beattie says: ‘It also throws you together with good people. ‘You can’t be an ****hole and be a good rugby player. It’s too sore, too difficult, too complicated. If you are an * ***hole you give up long before the top.’
This is one of his eternal truths. There is another concerning the Lions of 2025. ‘If they win, it will be fantastic. And I think they will win,’ he says.
But there is time for yet another indication of how times have changed. Beattie points out he still has a Lions training top upstairs. ‘It carries the sponsor’s logo,’ he says. It is Rothmans, the cigarette firm.
It is an emblem of a world lost in a hazy smoke of times past. The whiff of battle cordite awaits the 2025 Lions.
