"What we'll really remember is his presence and personality. Ray Gravell was Llanelli made flesh...But even in an age when such players were common, there was nobody quite like Grav." Huw Richards reports
"They've dropped Gravell, they can go to hell
I'm selling my debenture
No cowering bum behind the scrum
His play was a great adventure"
OK, so it wasn't exactly Dylan Thomas, but former regimental sergeant-major Tom Bellion caught something about Ray Gravell in his book of poems about Welsh rugby 'And the tanker spent a comfortable night'.
There was a gusto about the way he approached everything, a relish for life that makes it particularly poignant that he should have died so early, only in his mid-50s.
The records will show a pretty good career. There were 23 caps in an era when it was still hard to accumulate more than five or six in a year, a Lions tour with four test caps, three Triple Crowns, two Grand Slams and a host of Welsh Cup victories with Llanelli.
If he managed only a single try in those 23 matches, it has to be remembered that this was not the most fluid era in international rugby history - that wonderful winger Roger Baird, whose career overlapped with Gravell's in the early 1980s, did not cross at all in his 27 matches for Scotland.
We must also throw into the balance the defensive qualities most memorably captured by a banner-waving fan in a Gren cartoon 'Gravell eats soft centres'.
They will also note the tough upbringing in the community of Mynyddygarreg, on the borders between industrial and rural Wales, that included the trauma of finding his father's body after his suicide, the ill-health late in life - leading to the amputation of one leg, below the knee - that was borne with typical courage and humour, and the post-rugby careers in acting and broadcasting.
These occasionally cast him into unlikely situations.
Patrons at the Madrid cinema which was showing the Louis Malle bonkfest Damage in the mid 1990s can now be told that the reason for the hoot of laughter suddenly erupting from among them was your correspondent catching sight of Grav, for once the least demonstrative of those present (and, it should be emphasised, a non-participant in the bonking) in the role of Raymond the Chauffeur.
As a broadcaster he was equally at home, and just as unmistakeable, in both English and Welsh.
But what we'll really remember is his presence and personality. Ray Gravell was Llanelli made flesh.
That sort of personality is inevitably becoming less common by dint of rugby demographics, meaning that players are much less likelier than they were to join their home-town team, or stay with their first club for the whole of their career.
But even in an age when such players were common, there was nobody quite like Grav.
In his voluble emotionalism, his passionate pride in Welshness and his irrepressible humour he epitomised the qualities that make Llanelli the remarkable, invigorating and occasionally exasperating community that it is as nobody had done since Albert Jenkins, another fine centre who died relatively young, in the 1920s.
Nothing filled him with greater pride than his 485 appearances, a postwar record, for the Scarlets, or that he should have ended his life as president of the club.
In that role, and in his contribution to the life of both a town and a nation, he will be an impossibly hard act to follow.
Watch Ray Gravell in action on ESPN Classic this Sunday at 21.00 GMT as they dedicate a repeat of Wales' 1976 Five Nations clash with France to his memory.
"Eighty minutes against France was all that stood between Wales and a potential Grand Slam. Despite the strong start by France, Phil Bennett's team were soon back in the lead and held on to claim the biggest prize that existed in rugby at the time, the Five Nations Grand Slam..."