Craig Chalmers: "I knew something was wrong when he dropped his pint"

Chalmers, for years Doddie’s teammate both at Melrose and for the national side, is chuckling as he shares the memory, but it’s an affectionate laugh heavily weighed down with immense sadness.

Not long after, Doddie, a rugby giant on and off the field rarely seen without his familiar ear to ear grin, would announce he had been diagnosed with motor neuron disease (MND), triggering a tsunami of affection, concern and offers of help.

Doddie Weir, pictured shortly after his MND diagnosis (Image: Colin Mearns)

“I’d had no idea he wasn’t well,” recalls Chalmers of meeting up with Doddie in New Zealand in the run up to the 2017 British & Irish Lions tour.

“There was me and Joe Stanley, the ex-All Blacks centre that Doddie had played against. We were having a pint and Doddie came in.

“He was a bit squiffy, and his hand must have started to go…”

Doddie had been diagnosed a few months earlier but kept the news under wraps until that New Zealand trip; a precious chance to take in the rugby with wife Kathy, make memories with their sons Hamish, Angus and Ben, and to even squeeze in some bungee jumping.

Conscious of the impact he could have on raising awareness of a condition with devastating consequences, he opted to share his news on Global MND Awareness Day.

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He did it in typical ‘Doddie’ style, using his colourful larger than life character to bring hope to others. “I will devote my time towards assisting research and raising awareness and funds to help support fellow sufferers,” he said.

At the time, Doddie and his close friends were already working towards launching the charity that would bear his name and the number five - his rugby shirt number.

Since then, the My Name’5 Doddie Foundation has gone on to become a guiding light in funding research into a brutal disease which damages and attacks the nerves so eventually messages sent from the brain to the muscles no longer work.

It does not usually affect the senses but leads to weakness in the muscles and eventually paralysis.

And although rare, there are still two people in Scotland diagnosed every week, and up to 5,000 adults in the UK affected at any one time.

(Image: PA)

For them, the future is desperately bleak: there is currently no cure for MND. Around one third of people succumb to MND within a year and more than half within two years of diagnosis.

Doddie was given just 18 months to two years to live. Yet he defied the odds for six years.

Chalmers says as the disease took its toll, his friend’s determination never wavered, the smile rarely faded and the laughs – the backdrop to their rugby lives on and off the field together – kept on coming, even at the bleakest of times.

“I never saw him without his smile on his face, he was always smiling,” he recalls. “He must have had massive dark times, but he was always so positive.

“He wanted to help out and raise more money to find a cure even though he knew it would not happen in his lifetime.”

While his friends worried for his health, he pushed on.

“I used to say to him, ‘You’re doing too much,’” Chalmers remembers. “But he said, ‘I’ve got to keep going.’

“And that’s what he did, he never turned anything down.”

Doddie is rarely far from his thoughts, but it’s at times like this – a Six Nations weekend packed with good natured Auld Enemy rivalries and with a British Lions tour on the horizon – that his absence is felt mostly keenly.

A character like few others, at 6ft 6ins, he was unmistakable on the field, a towering lock forward. What he lacked in bulk, he made up for with a sudden burst of speed and – as Chalmers testifies – some neat passes.

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“Doddie got his first cap playing Argentina 1990. I remember him running up the wing throwing me a pass and I got a try near the end.” Second-row players like Doddie in those days, just didn’t do that kind of thing.

He went on to play in two Rugby World Cups, earning 61 international caps in total and scoring 19 points from four tries.

A career high - his appearance with the British and Irish Lions 1997 tour of South Africa - was blighted by a knee injury. But off the field was memorable for fly on the wall sports documentary Living with Lions, which perfectly caught Doddie’s infectious character.

There, in a room packed with Lions, sits Doddie, squirming in his chair as he’s challenged: “You were seen by a group of South African journalists in a nightclub around midnight on Friday… team management had put a team curfew on for everyone at 11pm, and you had had a few beers…”

Doddie was a not so easy to hide strapping, blond 6ft plus rugby bruiser. His rapid response - “Mistaken identity” – was pure ‘Doddie’.

Since his death in 2022, Chalmers, like so many who shared time with him on the rugby pitch or after dinner speakers’ circuit, in business circles and Scottish Borders’ farming, have been left with a Doddie shaped hole in their lives but precious memories.

He has faced his own health battles - prostate cancer, a diagnosis that sent him through a difficult journey as he wrestled with the mental impact as well as physical – leaving him in awe at how Doddie handled a disease that offers almost no hope.

“He was such a great character, and I was lucky enough to know him,” he continues.

The sport of rugby forged unique bonds, particularly among players who shared common backgrounds, for whom pranks and off-field shenanigans were as much part of team bonding as training.

“We had some great times on tour,” says Chalmers. “I remember us missing breakfast before the second test in Auckland in 1996.

“There was Damian Cronin and Doddie, and we decided to go to McDonalds for something to eat. They had three or four burgers each, that was pre-match healthy eating in those days.”

Rugby was also no hold’s barred on the pitch, and plenty of pints off it.

“One night we were in Melrose, the pitch was flooded, it was New Year’s Day and we were due to play on the next day.

Former rugby union player Craig Chalmers at Melrose Parish Church before a memorial service for Doddie Weir in Melrose (Image: PA)

“We thought that the game was off, so we’d go to a bar in Kelso. There was Carl Hogg and me and Doddie. We tossed a coin; heads, we were not going out, tails we wouldn’t.

“It landed on heads, so we did best of three.”

The trio headed out and savoured Kelso’s nightlife, hooking up with John Jeffries on the way.

“It turned out the game wasn’t off at all,” adds Chalmers. “We played and won the game by 50 points…

“Those times you don’t forget.”

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Playing for Melrose at the time was a special place to be, he adds.

“There were a lot of guys same age, the same mentality. We’d fall out and argue and fall back in again, we and had lot of time for each other on and off the field.

“We’d have good night’s celebrating victories and then get up every Sunday morning to run off the beers.

“The stories…”, he smiles, adding that most could not be repeated. “We had an old school big bath and the laughs we had talking about who was up to what.

“We had team culture long before people started talking about it, we understood each other and how each other worked.

“We were extremely lucky to land at the same time we did.”

Doddie was a relentless competitor on the pitch but his ability to mix mischief with sheer determination made him one of the most beloved figures in the game, even if he found training a nuisance which sometimes led to his teammates paying the price.

Doddie Weir runs in a try watched by team mate Stuart Reid during a Scotland A game against Spain at Murrayfield on December 28, 1991 in Edinburgh (Image: Rusty Cheyne/Allsport/Getty Images/Hulton Archive))

“Jim Telfer knew how lazy Doddie could be on the training pitch, but he also knew how talented he was.

“He used to give you a slap on the ear if he wasn’t happy about something.

“But he couldn’t reach Doddie’s ear, he was so tall. So, if you stood too close to Jim he’d give you Doddie’s clip on the ear instead.”

Often Doddie’s tour pranks were inspired by his Newcastle Falcons’ teammate Gary Armstrong. “He was chief prankster,” recalls Chalmers.

As Doddie’s health deteriorated, Gary, scrum half in Scotland's 1990 Grand Slam win, was often by his rugby pal’s side, devoted to helping him through.

Craig Chalmers pictured at Murrayfield, 2009 (Image: SNS Group Bill Murray)

“Gary was his chauffeur, he took him to the swimming pool, he tried to help Doddie’s wife, Kathy. It wasn’t easy trying to lug a big 6ft 6ins man around.

“Doddie was still a big unit. He started to struggle with movement and Gary was there all the time, he did it quietly and never asked for any thanks, one of his best mates.”

Doddie’s legacy is the hope he is bringing to today’s and tomorrow’s MND patients through his charity, My Name’5 Doddie Foundation.

Having come up with the idea in the early days of his diagnosis, it has grown to become a major force in funding researching into MND.

Even though MND took its his body, Doddie became one of the world’s most prominent campaigners and a figurehead who galvanised efforts to develop treatments and inspired fundraisers to pour millions of pounds into the Foundation.

In between, he found time to support fellow rugby player Rob Burrow, who was also in the grip of a fight against MND.

Even in the final weeks, his spark never dimmed.

Doddie Weir, with wife Kathy and their three sons (from left) Hamish, Ben and Angus, after receiving his OBE (Image: Jayne Barlow/PA)

Chalmers remembers his last visit, made on a whim, when he made a detour on a cycle ride through the Borders.

“I had the option: keep going straight and finish within two miles or turn right and go 13 miles to Doddie’s house. So I turned right.”

It was a Sunday morning. Guinness was poured. And Doddie, though weakened, was still Doddie.

“He was starting to lose his voice but we talked and he still had the patter. He wanted to know what was going on, who had been up to what.”

Within a week, he was gone.

And yet, he’s still here.

His distinctive tartan - blue and white to represent Scotland; black and yellow for Melrose Rugby Football Club – is seen wherever Scottish rugby is found, on the backs of marathon runners and cyclists raising money in his memory, at Murrayfield and in research laboratories carrying out important MND work.

“He told me before he died, ‘I’ll be long gone, but you’ll still be running about after me.’”

Chalmers pauses. “And he was spot on.”