Last night for me was the rugby equivalent of the day the music died.

Welsh people of my generation who were lucky enough to hit adolescence in the 1970’s didn’t bother with Batman, Superman or Spidermen, we had our own superhero. He didn’t need a Christian name or a surname just three initials… JPR.

To those of us who watched from the North Enclosure he was indestructible, invariably starting a match with stitches in one side of his face and ending it with some more on the other side for good measure.

For an orthopaedic surgeon he seemed to have very little regard for his own safety. The news about his sad passing revealed that John Peter Rhys Williams was human after all and that revelation hit us harder than one of his head on tackles.

How tough was he? Well, after the full-back was involved in a road traffic accident on the way to a Wales training session Gareth Edwards declared : “typical, isn’t it?

“The car’s a write-off. The petrol tanker that hit him is a write-off. But JPR comes out of it all in one piece.”

That was the incident that supposedly led a hospital spokesman to report the next day: “Mr Williams spent a comfortable night, but we were unable to save the tanker.”

Carwyn James once described JPR as : “A forest animal, he was blessed with a sixth sense for the presence of danger, an element which he often sought and loved”

Sadly my generation are now at that age where our childhood heroes begin to leave us on a regular basis, somehow the news that JPR has gone leaves a deep saddening emptiness that is hard to describe or explain.

As I lay awake in the early hours of this morning images were racing through my mind of the great man tackling Jean Francois Gourdon the French winger with a shoulder charge that secured a Grand Slam for Wales, and the first time I saw him play scoring two tries against England at Twickenham in 1976 as I was getting drenched in the South Stand.

We all have our own individual memories of this true legend of the game and whilst JPR may have left us I can guarantee he will never be forgotten.