VERNON PUGH: The man who brought much-needed reform to Welsh and international rugby union, Vernon Pugh, who has died aged 57, was international rugby union's most influential figure and a leading lawyer on planning and environment issues.
At the start of 1993, he was coaching a junior club, Cardiff Harlequins, but that April, the Welsh rugby union's general committee was overthrown. This followed the leak of Pugh's 1989 report into Welsh involvement in the centenary celebrations of the then South African rugby board.
Pugh was hired by the WRU to find out why so many Welsh players and administrators had gone to South Africa. In an unsolicited addendum, he concluded that the governing body was ill-equipped to run the game in a commercial era, and recommended wholesale reform.
The WRU never published the addendum, nor did it make its member clubs aware of its existence. When the South Wales Echo published it in February 1993, clubs forced the WRU's general committee to hold an extraordinary meeting. New elections followed a vote of no confidence.
Pugh refused to stand until two hours before nominations closed. He topped the poll as national representative and was elected the general committee's first chairman, a position he held until 1997.
He became one of Wales's two representatives on the international rugby board, and was its chairman within 12 months.
The chairmanship was in those days awarded on a rotational basis, with the eight foundation unions (England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia) taking it in turns to hold the position for a year. Pugh persuaded the IRB's council to change the system and in 1996 he became its first elected chairman.
He had served two three-year terms and was planning to stand down after the World Cup this autumn, before he was diagnosed with cancer last September.
As chairman of the board's amateur committee, it was Pugh who announced in August 1995 that rugby union was becoming open and abandoning its most cherished principle, that of not paying anyone for playing a part in the game. He was later accused of not giving unions enough time to prepare, but he had announced a review of amateurism in March that year.
After the World Cup, which was held that summer in South Africa, reports appeared suggesting that the Australian mogul Kerry Packer was trying to tempt the cream of the world's playing talent into joining a professional circus. Pugh described amateurism as a dam which could no longer hold water.
He was a pioneer. He helped set up the Heineken Cup, a tournament competed for by the leading clubs and provinces in Europe; he was instrumental in securing Italy's place in the Six Nations Championship; he worked assiduously to get rugby union accepted back into the Olympics; he established the international Sevens circuit to broaden the sport's popularity in a version of the game more readily understandable to neutrals than 15-a-side; and he had a vision of rugby union as a game of international appeal rather than one which had significance in only a few countries.
He persuaded China to join the IRB and believed that the sport's future depended on getting a toehold in countries with large populations, such as the US.
It was one of the reasons why he arranged an inaugural contest between the hemispheres last November: he saw it as a means of raising money for emerging nations, but his illness allowed vested interests to prevail and the game was called off.
Pugh was born in Glynmoch near Ammanford. His father was a miner and a self-educated socialist who took his three teenage sons down a pit, telling them when they reached the surface: "I never want to see you near a place like this again."
Pugh was educated at Amman Valley Grammar School; the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth; and Downing College, Cambridge, where he gained his LLB. He was called to the bar in 1969 and achieved his ambition of becoming a QC before the age of 40.
He played in the centre for Pontypridd and Cardiff HSOB. His passion was coaching - he took charge of Welsh Universities at the same time he became the board's full-time chairman - and he longed to see Wales as a major force in the world game again.
"Vernon was the greatest administrator Wales has produced," said the former WRU secretary Dennis Gethin, a contemporary at Cambridge. "There has been no better one in the world in my time, but I suspect he would have given it all up to become the coach of Wales."
Pugh turned down a high court judgeship because he would have had to give up his IRB position. His sharp intellect meant many regarded him as aloof and arrogant, but far from arrogance, he was warm and convivial among friends and disarmingly polite to those who crossed him.
He was a radical for whom too much tradition was dangerous: his aim was to turn the IRB into a business and he wanted to hand over the chairmanship to a chief executive rather than someone on a union's committee.
A keen soccer player in his youth, Pugh was an avid racegoer and was at the Cheptsow meeting two days before his death, having attended the wedding of his daughter Nerys 11 days before. He died at a hospice in Penarth.
He is survived by his wife, Dorinda, and their three daughters, Non, Nerys and Nia.
Glanville Vernon Pugh, lawyer and rugby administrator, born July 5th 1945; died April 24th 2003