Mumbles’ own Jonathan Davies is hanging up his BBC microphone after next year’s Six Nations.
The former Wales fly-half, known to everyone as Jiffy, told the Telegraph his last match will be Italy v Wales in Rome. It will be his 30th championship in the commentary box.
He was clear that nobody had shown him the door. “It’s just time,” he said.
‘It’s just time’: why Jiffy is leaving the BBC
Davies, 64, said the decision was his own, and that the corporation had been “great with me”.
The BBC took him on when he stopped playing in 1997 and sat him next to Bill McLaren. He went on to work with Eddie Butler and, more recently, Andrew Cotter.
He covered rugby league too, the code in which he captained Great Britain, sometimes going from a union match straight into a league one.
Why he chose the microphone over coaching
Davies said he had planned to coach. Then his first wife, Karen, became ill with the cancer that killed her in 1997, aged 34.
With young children at home, television let him earn a living and be there for most of the week, he said.
That loss is behind his work for Velindre, the cancer charity he has been president of since 2009. He said it has raised more than £65m in that time.
He was made a CBE earlier this year for his fundraising and broadcasting, and said the honours belonged to “the whole team at Velindre”.
Golf, padel and S4C: what comes next in Mumbles
He lives in Mumbles with his wife, Jay, and is a grandfather. He told the paper he will “never be bored”.
More golf is planned, along with padel. His Welsh-language chat show, Jonathan, carries on at S4C, and so do the after-dinner speeches.
He has not gone quiet on Welsh rugby either. Davies has called for the WRU board to quit, and said much of the mess was of the union’s own making.
He is hopeful about the union’s new chairman, Lyndon Faulkner, a man he played against in the 1980s.
As for the commentary box, he said it was time to hang up the microphone “next to those boots”.
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