Free Calon by Owen Sheers

run-up:

     
    ‘Keep upright.’
              ‘Not too fast.’
                        ‘Make good contact.’
                                  ‘Follow through.’
     
    Follow through.
    Leigh has been training with Jenks ever since the ex-Wales and British Lions fly-half came to Swansea to run a kicking session for the Ospreys academy. Leigh was just sixteen at the time and ‘nervous as hell’ about meeting Wales’s greatest-ever kicker. But his grandfather recognised that the session marked the next step in his grandson’s career. ‘The apprenticeship’s over now, boy,’ he told Leigh that day. ‘I’ve taken you as far as I can. You’re with the main man now.’
    As Jenks talks Leigh through his practice kicks on the Castle pitch this morning, a clear sky burning off the river mist, he does not necessarily look like ‘the main man’ or, some would say, like a rugby player at all. As he paces behind Leigh, a pair of rugby balls tucked under one arm, two more held in each hand, he walks with a rolling, agricultural gait, his close-cropped red hair receding from his forehead and temples to a pair of protruding ears. He is not especially big and his frame is softer-edged than you might expect. But Leigh’s grandfather’s statement is still impossible to deny. Anyone who knows their rugby also knows that Jenks is every inch ‘the main man’.
    In his thirteen-year international career Jenks rackedup more points than any Welsh player in history, scoring a total of eleven tries, 130 conversions, 235 penalties and ten drop goals. When he retired, he was the only player in the world to have scored more than a thousand international points. As he punts balls back down the pitch to Leigh this morning each kick betrays why that was the case. Every ball, nine years after Jenks hung up his boots, still lands with precision at Leigh’s feet.
    Between them Jenks and Leigh, coach and player, mentor and pupil, bridge the gap between rugby’s amateur past and its professional future. Both Jenks and Leigh debuted young, at nineteen. Both had relatives putting in the hours in the wings: Leigh his grandfather; Jenks his uncles Peter and Andrew, drilling him towards a style and a rhythm on the training pitch at Pontypridd. But where Leigh came into the Wales set-up via the academies and a professional career, Jenks was filling a skip in his family’s scrapyard when his father returned from the pub one day to tell him he was in the Welsh squad to face England. When he learnt about his second cap, he was tiling a council house and listening to the team announcement on a radio. Where Leigh built himself up through years of weights, strength programmes and supplements, Jenks was conditioned by swinging a sledgehammer or dragging an old tyre on shuttle runs in the alley behind his house. Jenks was a player formed in rugby’s amateur era, driving lorries of scrap metal the length of Britain or working in Just Rentals between games. In contrast, Leigh has beenshaped by the professional game, the hours of his days portioned by the training, media and fixture schedules of club and country.
    Yet as they work together on the Castle pitch this morning, rehearsing the combinations that will unlock each kick, there is more shared territory between these two men than not. However much rugby has changed, there will always be fundamentals of a player’s experience that will never alter and will continue to form strong bonds between the generations. For Leigh and Jenks the goal-kicker’s ritual of solitary practice, that silent benediction exercised on a succession of empty pitches, has provided them with thousands of hours of shared experience . Though practised years apart, the two men’s characters have been formed in the shadow of these repeated attempts to balance that ever-unstable equation of man, rugby ball and posts.
    And then there have been those other shared experiences too. Rarer,