Obituary: Vernon Pugh

International rugby administrator. Died aged 57.

Vernon Pugh dragged rugby union kicking, if not screaming, from the age of the amateur to full-blooded professionalism in what amounted to a revolution in France in August 1995. The fallout is still being felt.

For more than 150 years the game had recoiled from paying players, but at a meeting in Paris, Pugh blew the amateur principles asunder and declared rugby an "open" sport. It was not what the diehards expected.

As the first elected chairman of the International Board, Pugh, a QC, persuaded the delegates that they had no choice but to vote for radical change. "If we had not taken that decision then, I have no doubt the game would have disintegrated," he said later.

"It seemed to me that the special ethos of rugby was not irrefutably linked to the non-payment of players. It just could not be proven.

"We had to acknowledge the changes which had taken place. The Southern Hemisphere had put building blocks in place for professionalism. There was no point in fiddling about. It was too late for evolution."

Pugh, who died after a battle with cancer, was brought up in the Amman Valley in Wales, the son of a miner. He went to Aberystwyth University and on to Cambridge, where he played rugby but failed to win a Blue. He was called to the Bar in 1969.

As a barrister he specialised in common law; as a rugby administrator he specialised in tackling shamateurism.

The game had become big business, but the laws stipulated that players could not be paid. Pugh knew the law was an ass because people were being paid unofficially.

Pugh had not sat on a committee until a friend talked him into standing for the Welsh Rugby Union, and his application was lodged only 10 minutes before the deadline. In 1993 he became the first chairman of the WRU general committee, and chairman of the IRB a year later.

The first World Cup was launched in 1987, the year after the New Zealand Cavaliers toured South Africa, where they were paid, although not openly, to play.

In 1994, again preceding the threat of a televised professional circus in the Southern Hemisphere involving Louis Luyt, the head of South African rugby, and Rupert Murdoch, Pugh chaired a working party on amateurism.

Seventeen months later, Pugh ended the hypocrisy. He was at the forefront of deals with television and sponsors, set about expanding the World Cup, helped Italy to turn the Five Nations into Six, and developed the Heineken Cup.

"Professionalism brings problems," Pugh admitted. "There is a danger of the ethos being polluted, and that is why we must have strong managers. We have to stand up to aggressive commercial concerns who want to put money solely in the pockets of the few."

During his term as IRB chairman, he found the lack of authority of the board distressing.

At times he was guilty of corralling too much power and he made enemies.

There was an acrimonious falling-out with the New Zealand Rugby Union last year when Pugh stripped them of their co-host status, alongside Australia, for this year's World Cup after they failed to comply with certain commercial strictures.

Rugby has changed, but as it has grown, so has the gap between the haves and have-nots, and Pugh's vision of a world in union remains a dream.

- INDEPENDENT