Playing as a second row forward, he was an integral part of Scotland's tight five during the early 1970s, along with Ian McLauchlan, Sandy Carmichael, Frank Laidlaw and Alastair McHarg, which became known collectively as the Mean Machine.

Speaking of the brothers Brown, he thinks their skill was in their genes, but that Peter and Gordon were very different: They inherited sporting ability, for their father was an international goalkeeper.

The average spectator, not good at seeing who wins the ball in the line-out for instance, could watch a match without being aware of Gordon Brown.

He trained daily at Ibrox stadium under the guidance of Jock Wallace of Rangers who put him through a gruelling fitness regime.

The [99 call] battles [of the 1974 British Lions tour to South Africa] created one of rugby's immortal tales: Brown hit his opposite number, Johan de Bruyn, so hard that the Orange Free State man's glass eye flew out and landed in the mud.

"so there we are, 30 players plus the ref, on our hands and knees scrabbling about in the mire looking for this glass eye," recalled Brown in an interview before his death from non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2001, aged 53.

"Eventually, someone yells 'Eureka' whereupon de Bruyn grabs it and plonks it straight back in the gaping hole in his face."

As reported by The Daily Telegraph, at a fundraising dinner held in late February 2001 for Brown due to his illness, he met with de Bruyn again.

Twenty-seven years on and De Bruyn was tracked down ... and persuaded, with little or no effort, to fly over and wait in the wings on Wednesday night as a clip of Brown telling his famous story was played on the big screen.