Famous Sporting People visiting Pembrokeshire:

 

Phil Steele – my favourite after-dinner speaker by Bill Carne

 


If any rugby club or group needed a speaker for a special event and asked me to recommend one,  I can honestly say that my unhesitating answer would be Phil Steele, who for many years was a Special Needs teacher in the Aberdare area and a promising rugby player with Newport until a broken leg brought a halt to his playing days at only 23 years of age, after he had played for the Welsh Students and looked likely to be chosen for the Wales B squad.
 
I have been lucky enough to have heard Phil a few times, starting with a brewer’s invitational evening at Narberth Rugby Club and several other venues since - and I have never a heard a swear or a dirty joke because he is a great observer of life - and as proud president of Taffs Well RFC, where he runs a podcast about life in the town - it is hilarious!
 

Good story tellers or just using jokes that go around the circuit

 
Some speakers at sports evenings are just ‘would-be comics’ and I might be considered old-fashioned (after all I am 79 years young!) but I have heard loads of ‘guest speakers’, many of them former top Welsh players, who have joined the after-dinner circuit and are doing very nicely, thank you very much, for speaking for 40 minutes at dinners or joining others for an ‘Evening with ...’ in a club or theatre, both of which reap huge financial rewards.
 
A number of them tell jokes that go the rounds, like most of them have ‘the daftest player I knew’, which goes down well or dirty jokes that involve frequent use of the F-word or, even worse, the C-word - and quite frankly they bore me a little.
 
To get them to speak for about 40 minutes might cost you in the region of £1,500 to £2,500 - and I recently acted as MC to a former rugby ‘great’ who pocketed quite a sum well above that on four consecutive evenings!
 

Phil can have you in stitches or tears with his total honesty

 
And that is why Phil Steele is my No 1 because he has had me in tears of laughter or brought a lump to me throat, like when, in answer to a question, he admitted that in his playing days he became so worried about missing penalty kicks or conversions that he dreaded his team being awarded them because he thought he could actually see the posts getting narrower as he prepared to put the ball between them - and then his mental health issues he battled to overcome.
 
He is also very open about the loss of his wife Liz, a Pembrokeshire lass, with cancer and what that meant to him - and then tells the true story that when he first met his second wife Kate, in a Cardiff night club and found she was also from this county he tried to impress her with a first line of,
“Oh Yeah. My first wife’s ashes are scattered there!”
And it worked because they are now long-time man and wife!
 

Highly respected pundit and commentator

 
His CV as a rugby pundit and commentator for ‘Scrum Five’ and Radio Wales is already convincing but perhaps even more impressive is some of the ‘gigs’ he has been invited to speak at, like The House of Lords, St Davids Hall, The Cardiff International Arena. - and even the Qatar Welsh Society Annual Dinner.
 
Since 2009 he has been an ambassador for the Cardiff Hospice for cancer patients and he was awarded the OBE for his charity work, which he says stands for being ‘Old Boy of Ely’, the Cardiff area where he was brought up - and if you listen to his dulcet tones for a short while there is no doubting where he hails from!
 
Read Phil’s autobiography – it is brilliant!
 
I would also recommend Phil Steele’s autobiography, entitled ’Nerves of Steele’ as a wonderful present to buy a rugby lover and also a good read for anyone else too because it really is a life story in the best sense.
 
I was lucky to meet up again with him when he attended a book signing, where else but at the Victoria Book Shop in Haverfordwest, where we chatted over a coffee and a pile of luxury biscuits, with Marley Davies as the top host, who generously supplied me with a signed copy, as he always did for sports people I interviewed there.
 

A great pal shared by Messrs Steele and Carne

 
Phil already knew that my wife Marilyn and I used to meet his lovely late mother-in-law Anne, who was immensely proud of him – and there was also another person that Phil and I had in common.
 
From 1970 to ‘73 I was a trainee teacher and my best pal at Barry Training College was Peter Ford, a lovely character from Aberdare, with whom I shared my first teaching practice in the Victoria Junior School in Penarth - and we still keep in touch now 50 years later.
 
When Phil and I chatted about his teaching, it transpired that his long-standing best pal, in and out of school, is none other than someone I know so well and still keep in touch with after over 50 years - it is Mr Ford and his charming wife Betty!
 
So, if there was a chance to go to a function where Phil Steele was speaking, even outside our fantastic county, I would break my low-travelling maxim to go - and I can only say if you have the chance go as well - you will not regret it!