The French Rugby Federation had placed bottles of expensive aftershave at each setting. Colclough poured his aftershave into an ice bucket, washed out the bottle and filled it with water. He stood up and challenged Colin Smart to drink the contents of his aftershave bottle. Both men did so; Smart ended in hospital having his stomach pumped.
It is fashionable to say of massive rugby forwards like Colclough that they were larger than life. Yet his death last week at 52, after a long battle with a brain tumour, robs English rugby of one of its biggest figures — in terms of size and rumbustious colour. Everyone has a torrent of Maurice tales, from his period as an England player between 1978 and 1986, and from all those locations where this engaging man landed on the trail.
For a man with Colclough’s size, inner hardness and skill, it is fascinating to speculate how great a player he might have become had he pushed himself to the limit in a professional era. At his best he was one of the finest operators in the middle of the lineout, and played all four Tests in each of the Lions tours he made, to South Africa in 1980 and to New Zealand in 1983. In this era before lifting, when lineout success depended on power and devil and, frankly, cheating, he was unsurpassed.
It could be that to have forced Colclough into a monk-like dedication would have removed the essence of the man and some of his appetite for sport and life. He tended to wander, establishing businesses in the leisure field in places as diverse as Angouleme in France and Swansea in Wales. Not all of them were financial gold mines. But the rigid constraints of a pro rugby team might well have irked him.
His chief regret from his playing career was that the England team that won the Grand Slam in 1980 never developed that triumph: “We were allowed to drift apart too quickly, just when we could have been on the verge of something good and sustained.”
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Sometimes it was politic to keep out of his way. One afternoon during England’s tour of North America in 1982 he burst into the room of Colin Elsey, the late photographer. Elsey had returned to the tour after covering the world heavyweight title fight between Larry Holmes and Gerry Cooney. Colclough grabbed Elsey’s films, exposing one of the reels and making it useless. Elsey protested that the damaged reel contained a perfect frame of the knockout punch that Holmes had delivered to the head of Cooney.
Colclough was mortified, allowing Elsey to see out the tour in peace. Elsey had made up the story, finally finding a way to keep Maurice quiet. It was a rare moment of peace in a raucous and splendid sporting life.