Old-timers like to say they “don’t make ‘em like they used to,” but it is difficult to disagree with when you hear tales about quite possibly the hardest rugby player of them all, Alex “Grizz” Wyllie, who died this week at the age of 80 on his Canterbury farm.

The All Blacks have had many a toughie, including the legendary Colin “Pinetree” Meads and Wayne Shelford, who played on with a ruptured scrotum in a game against France, with his testicles dangling out.

When I heard that Grizz had gone, my mind shot back to the stories that shocked me when Wyllie coached Eastern Province and Transvaal.

It is not stretching things too far to suggest that Wyllie remotely influenced the 1995 Springbok World Cup triumph because he coached most of the Springboks at the Transvaal.

In the early ‘90s, Wyllie had had enough of his Transvaal team underperforming. He called a meeting in the change room, put cases of liquor in the middle, and said, “I’m locking you useless bastards in here. You’re not getting out ‘til the booze is finished and you have sorted your s..t out.”

The players did just that and started winning.

Wyllie and whiskey… He had a taste for it, and doubles were for cissies. He would order three of them (doubles, not cissies), pour them into a tall glass, and down them like beer.

Tales of his hell-raising, on and off the field, could fill a book. They have. Several books on his life have been published in New Zealand, where he is a national hero.

It was at Eastern Province that Wyllie found his home from home. In the amateur era (pre-1996), EP were notoriously tough and most certainly dirty. Many of them came from Rassie Erasmus’s blue-collar neighbourhood of Despatch, where babies have knuckledusters in their prams instead of rattles.

I recall tales of Wyllie ordering street-fighter locks Adrie Geldenhuys and Armand du Preez to fight him. “You don’t listen to me, so I am going to have to beat it into you.”

They declined, and that is something because the aforementioned threw a few haymakers in their day.

I asked former EP hooker Jaco Kirsten for his recollections of Grizz.

“We think South Africans are hard, but Grizz was the toughest man I ever met. He fitted right in at EP. We both loved and feared him in equal measure.

“One story I will never forget, I can see it as plain as yesterday,” Kirsten said, warming up. “We heard a whisper from New Zealand that Grizz had this nickname that he couldn’t stand, ‘Hereford heir’. Nobody knows why he found the name offensive, but a few guys learned the hard way not to be too loud.

“We had been celebrating a win, and the liquor was flowing. Nico Meyer and Frans Erasmus (both enormous men) started chanting “Hereford heir”. Grizz walked up to them and knocked them out.

“We had a No 8 called Harold Karele. He was battling to understand a move Grizz wanted us to perform. Grizz’s patience ran out, and he told Barry to move to the opposition defence, and he took Barry’s place. He charged into Barry like a madman, leading with a stiff arm, flattening him. While Barry wiped the blood from his mouth, Grizz said. ‘Now you understand what I want?’”

Kirsten said that Wyllie’s unorthodox methods resulted in a wave of success that propelled EP into the Super 10 competition with the best teams from New Zealand and Australia.

“When we got off the plane in New Zealand, there were cameras everywhere and we thought we were rock stars,” he said. “But we quickly learned that the cameras were for Grizz. He was huge in New Zealand, and nobody cared about us.

“But we cashed in on his fame. He organised whiskey-tasting tours and visits to breweries. And sports companies lavished us with kit. We got more kit on that tour than we ever did in SA.”

Wyllie came from farming stock in Canterbury and went to school in Christchurch. Besides rugby, Alex excelled at boxing, but the school had to scrap it because he kept knocking opponents out.

As a young club player, he dislocated his thumb in a game, and the medics could not put it back in. He refused to go off, saying, ‘I’ll just tuck it behind my hand.

His nickname did not come from his resemblance to a grizzly bear but from a scrumhalf who had had his ear bent all game by Wyllie’s vicious verbals.

“God, you’ve done nothing but grizzle, grizzle, grizzle all game,” the scrummie complained (Grizzle is New Zealand slang for “complain.”

In 1970, Wyllie toured South Africa with the All Blacks. He was a constant menace as a combative flank in the first two Tests (the Boks won the first, the All Blacks the second) and the Boks celebrated when Wyllie couldn’t play in the third because of injury, which is hard to believe given he felt no pain. The Boks won the third and fourth Tests.

Wyllie went straight into coaching after finishing as a player and had brilliant success with Canterbury and the All Blacks (they had a 91 percent win record when he was the coach).

Like many tough guys, Wyllie had a fine sense of humour.

On the eve of a big game between Canterbury and Auckland, a news reporter said, “The stadium is sold out. All the seats have gone.”

Deadpan, Wyllie responded, “Have they? They were there when we were at training tonight.”