At 11.48am on Wednesday morning, along with all my fellow trustees on the Welsh Sports Hall of Fame, I got an email from Rhodri Morgan.

He was our chairman. Of course he was. Who else in Wales could oversee this historical roll of athletic honour than the man who was a walking Wikipedia of Welsh Sport?

As usual it was a missive full of warmth, wit and enthusiasm. The previous Friday night Rhodri had hosted our annual dinner, welcoming cricket’s Peter Walker, football’s Terry Yorath, rugby’s Graham Price and Olympic athlete Christian Malcolm into the Hall of Fame.

The email thanked us all, and secretary Jeff in particular, for putting the event together.

We’d had a jokey relay across the room on the night – complete with baton – linking Welsh athletes through the generations from octogenarian sprinter Ron Jones to Christian Malcolm via JJ Williams and Lynn Davies.

“I don’t know whose idea it was to have that ‘fake news’ relay race but it worked really well. It added to the jollity of the occasion,” Rhodri wrote, continuing, “Christian Malcolm, Peter Walker, Graham Price and Terry Yorath all told yarns that I’ve never heard before, which is saying something! Well done everybody.”

I closed the email with a smile. I usually closed Rhodri’s emails with a smile. They were always cheering, interesting and funny.

Rhodri had a vision to shake-up government in Wales

We could never have known that the next time we saw his name that day we would be greeting it not with smiles but with tears, as we learned the devastating news that Rhodri was gone.

I can’t imagine how painful Rhodri’s passing, with its awful suddenness, must be for his wife Julie and their children and grand-children.

But it is to be hoped that they can draw some comfort from the heartfelt tributes that have been expressed by people, young and old, across the spectrum of Welsh life.

From students describing how he had helped them with their dissertations to pensioners in Mwnt recalling his love of their landscape, there were none of the platitudes that usually accompany the death of a politician.

Everyone had a real story about meeting him – vivid anecdotes about encounters in farmers’ markets or football stands.

Ordinary people telling tales of conversations in ordinary places. He may have once held the top job in Wales but you were more likely to bump into Rhodri in Leckwith Asda than a black-tie do full of movers and shakers.

He had no time for snobbery or those who patronised and belittled the country he loved. My mother particularly admired the way he saw off our metropolitan detractors.

I’ll never forget the night she rang me and said: “You missed Rhodri giving that sneery little so and so a what for. It was brilliant!”

Tony Blair had opposed Rhodri Morgan's bid to lead the party in the Assembly but came to respect his achievements

Mam was referring to the retort he had sent Jeremy Vine’s way when the Newsnight presenter said: “Don’t switch off. There is no easy way to say this. We’re about to discuss the Welsh Assembly”.

Rhodri hit straight back with: “You might have thought we were poor, Welsh and funny and pathetic but we don’t care what you think about us any more. It doesn’t matter what people around Hampstead dinner tables think about us”.

Lord Dafydd Elis Thomas said this week that those who didn’t get Rhodri, didn’t get Wales. He’s right. Rhodri embodied all the best characteristics of what it is to be Welsh – the love of language, culture and history; the passion for sport and the complete lack of pretension.

I first met Rhodri 16 years ago, interviewing him for a radio series called More Than A Game on the hinterland of Welsh rugby. We hit it off immediately.

In subsequent years, Rhodri became my go-to expert on sporting matters. We worked together on several more radio projects; compared notes on sharing the columnist pages of this newspaper every Saturday and our paths crossed regularly as fellow ambassadors of Velindre Cancer Centre and on the board of the Welsh Sports Hall of Fame.

I loved the way sport informed his thinking. He had his own moments of glory as a useful teenage table tennis player in the Cardiff & District league and a distance runner who was still breaking the hour for 10 miles aged 39.

But it was his passion for more elite feats that coloured his politics. No other Welsh orator managed to slip in quite so many oblique references to the oval ball.

Former First Minister Rhodri Morgan in a Welsh rugby jersey and scarf at the new Millennium Stadium in 1999
Former First Minister Rhodri Morgan in a Welsh rugby jersey and scarf at the new Millennium Stadium in 1999

When he was stitched up in the race to become First Secretary, his response to the question “will you stand again” became his leitmotif.

“Does a one-legged duck run in circles” was actually borrowed from a Cardiff prop who used the line when asked was he pleased to get his Welsh cap.

As for the barbs from the Alun Michael camp: “There’s always going to be a lot of barging in the line-out and elbowing in the teeth. But after the game you have to just go into the bar and have a pint with the person who thumped you.”

And when Rhodri finally made it to First Minister, he kicked off with: “My first act in the Welsh jersey with the captain’s armband is to reappoint the Cabinet under Standing Order No. 2.4 in their present portfolios…”

I once spotted him in a literal rather than figurative Welsh jersey, wandering around Sydney Harbour during the 2003 World Cup.

With his Don King ‘fro and love of plaid jackets, Rhodri never had much time for sartorial elegance. And people loved him all the more for his off-message wardrobe choices.

It was all part of his unspun authenticity. While most AMs hung nothing more adventurous than a M&S mac in their offices, Rhodri had a Patagonian poncho on his hook.

Rhodri and Julie Morgan AM campaign in Whitchurch, Cardiff, ahead of the Assembly elections in 2016

Not everyone warmed to it, of course. Remember how bitchy Tories cited his wearing of a “woolly red jumper and beige cargo pants” at a function in honour of Donald Anderson MP as if it was a crime against humanity rather than fashion?

That said, I have to admit the battered and boil-washed old Welsh shirt I saw Rhodri wearing in Australia that day looked like it had accompanied him to every match he’d ever seen.

And with his seven decade record of spectating, that’s a lot of games – though I don’t doubt that Rhodri would have been able to recount every single one, complete with date, score and the name of the man of the match.

He once told me about his very first rugby experience: “I’m a product of my own watching past. I was a war baby therefore I was about seven before I saw any rugby. It was 1946 and I went to see Cardiff with my father,” he explained.

“My father had been a centre at Swansea University with Claude Davey who captained Wales to victory over New Zealand in 1935.

My father retired from the game very early because of a broken shoulder but he was mad-keen on centre play and as it happened Cardiff had the most outstanding centre-pairing in the world at the time – Bleddyn Williams and Jack Matthews.

Rhodri when he was made First Secretary of Wales - the role was quickly changed to First Minister

Any time Bleddyn would do a side-step my father would simply go beserk next to me. He would stand up as Bleddyn went on a run of side-steps – they were quite astonishing because he was a big guy, almost 14 stone –but he could do four side-steps on the trot to cut right through the defence.

No other player of that size I’ve ever seen in history could do that. My father would just go completely out of control. And I’d get caught up in it.”

Another rugby rite of passage presented itself in 1951. I’ll never forget it because it marked my admission into the adult world of how important Wales and England rugby matches were,” Rhodri told me.

“It happened on the street in Gwaelod y Garth where we used to go to chapel. Chapel life was still pretty important. There was a big Congregationalist chapel which I was a member of and a fallen-on-hard-times Baptist Chapel further up the road.

“And it was the 1951 Wales v England game. Wales had beaten England 23-5. In these days of the five point try it would have been 50 points. In the days of the three point try if you beat a team 23-5 that was an incredibly crushing victory.

“On the Sunday morning all the men rushed out of chapel. I was 12 years old and allowed to join them. It was a kind of rite of passage to be standing there in the middle of the road – no traffic in those days, of course. This day the road was full. The men wanted to discuss the game for as long as they possibly could until their Sunday dinners were ready.

Wales rugby forward, Frank Hill's Triple Crown medal, 1893, which was in Australia until recently, presented to Rhodri Morgan
Wales rugby forward, Frank Hill's Triple Crown medal, 1893, which was in Australia until recently, presented to Rhodri Morgan

“At one point there must have been 30 of us in a circle, all men apart from me. I was in seventh heaven being admitted into this adult circle. And the excitement of going over every move in that game, how well we’d done and how we were going to walk it for the Triple Crown and so on.

“And suddenly this one Baptist man walks past from the other chapel, they only used to get about six people going there, they didn’t have a minister. Ben Rees, his name was.

“Everyone turned to acknowledge him because he was the local rent collector. He turned and looked very jealously at this big gang of Congregationalists and said: ‘Must have been a very interesting sermon you had today!’

“And I thought that was a wonderful comment on Welsh life. He knew what we’d been discussing and it wasn’t that sermon. It was the game the day before and beating the English 23-5. Fantastic memory!”

Yet Rhodri wasn’t just interested in the golden sporting recollections of his youth. He followed every facet of the modern game.

The morning after the soul-destroying red card that effectively ended Wales’s chances of reaching the final of the 2011 Rugby World Cup he sent me a lengthy email outlining with forensic precision his view of Sam Warburton’s tip tackle on French wing Vincent Clerc.

It was not a move of malicious intent, Rhodri concluded, but of simple physics, the inevitable result when two players of such differing bodyweights collided.

This attention to detail was usual. For someone with such a common touch, Rhodri was phenomenally cerebral.

He could bond with anyone from any background largely because his brain could make the most fantastic connections. Whatever subject came up in conversation he could enrich it with historical context, a philosophical concept or just quirky tangential facts.

Rhodri Morgan with his grandson Jaidem Jackson-Morgan
Rhodri Morgan with his grandson Jaidem Jackson-Morgan in Pontypridd for the 'IN' vote for the euro referendum. pic Rob Browne

An example of the latter came in an email exchange about me missing a board meeting because I had an interview with screenwriter Andrew Davies planned. He replied: “Andrew went to school with me. Terribly clever. I’ll never forget his school cricket match poem in the school magazine, written in Longfellow pentameters or whatever that form of Hiawatha verse is called?!”

Another email followed. “You must ask him as well about the school’s ultimate heart-throb Hilary Taylor who was in Andrew’s year, who later went out with Michael Aspel when he was selling carpets in David Morgan’s. She got the ultimate job for a Welsh Forces sweetheart of becoming an air stewardess with Cambrian Airways! You could write a play about her (or he could). Life in the Fifties!”

As well as these wonderfully meandering digital chats, I’ll never forget his kindness.

In 2011 we worked together on a radio series called Rhodri Morgan’s Guide to Retirement. As he came to terms with his own transition from frontline politics, he explored life after work with people who’d done all sorts of jobs.

It involved quite a bit of travel across Wales and each time I picked him from his house – which featured rugby posts in the garden for the grandchildren – he would provide me with a home-cooked meal before we began and wave me off with a bag of home-grown veg at the end of our working day.

But most of all, I still cherish the beautiful letter he sent when I lost my mother. He described how he hoped I could adjust to the “entirely different shape the world has when we lose a parent.”

Those wise and poignant words have taken on a new resonance with the passing of Rhodri himself.

For, as Carwyn Jones reflected, Wales has lost a real father figure.