Tony Copsey isn’t quite Moose Malloy, the Raymond Chandler character whom the great author styled as being as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.
“He was a big man,” wote Chandler of his creation, “but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck. His skin was pale and he needed a shave. He would always need a shave.”
Copsey? He actually stood 6ft 7in tall and weighed 17st 8lb in his Llanelli and Wales prime. He looked a formidable specimen on the pitch, then, but off it he was as amiable as they come.
Still is, probably.
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When this writer had cause to ring him a couple of years ago, he could not have been more helpful, taking 20 minutes out of his day to chat.
But on the pitch back then, he definitely wasn’t a man to rile. Opponents who started arguments with Copsey more often than not found that the Essex-born giant finished them.
Neil Francis, former Ireland lock and now controversial newspaper columnist, couldn’t even be said to have begun an argument with Copsey when he was decked in an international in Dublin in 1992. How the Wales lock escaped sanction over that one remains a puzzle to this day. You can read all about that incident here.
Whatever, a different day and a different dust-up came in October 1995 when Llanelli hosted Cardiff in an eagerly awaited east-west league match. It proved to be a fractious, disappointing affair, unworthy of its billing as Welsh rugby’s game of the weekend.
The match was eight minutes from home when Mike Hall became involved in a significant difference of opinion with Ieuan Evans, his off-pitch business partner at the time in the Just Players company the pair had helped set up.
Enter Copsey stage left, not altogether in classic peacemaker mode.
Hall found himself floored and Copsey found himself sent off.
That wasn’t even the end of it.
Far from it.
Copsey received a 10-week ban and Hall needed five weeks to recover from a fractured cheekbone, with the Wales centre missing his club’s match against that year’s Fijian tourists.
With the game having gone professional barely a month earlier, Llanelli compensated Hall to the tune of around £1,000.
Barely two weeks earlier, Hall had had his nose broken at Neath.
It seemed almost open season on the Cambridge University graduate.
But Hall and Copsey had been Wales team-mates and there was no deep-seated grievance. Two days after the flare up at Stradey, Copsey spoke to this writer over the phone and admitted his regret over the incident.
He also rang Hall to talk the matter through.
There were calls for Hall to call in the lawyers.
But it never went that far, with the issue eventually settled without the need for such drama.
To his credit, Hall admitted only recently that he hadn’t exactly been blame free in the incident.
“Listen, I played my part in that. I may have started the fight,” he said.
“You dished it out sometimes, you got caught sometimes.
“Tony rang me a few days after.
“There was a bit of hard feeling between Cardiff and everybody at that time. There was sometimes hatred between the clubs. But the individual players would shake hands and move on.”
In total, the smashed cheekbone prevented Hall from earning appearance money and bonuses from four league matches and the Fiji tour game.
But he managed to keep a souvenir of the episode.
"With the money from Tony, plus a few win bonuses, I bought some new curtains for the house which became known as the Copsey Curtains," he said.
They were no doubt viewed with caution every time he approached them.
