"It was important that we showed that we would look after ourselves," Ian McGeechan, a midfielder on the tour who went on to become a coach of Scotland and the Lions, told the Guardian. "But it wasn't used very often, it wasn't called every game. There was one very brutal game in Port Elizabeth against Eastern Province and there was a bit of a flare-up in the third test more than any others. It was only if it was needed, and everybody understood why it was there."
Legend has it that before the tour McBride, a tough Irish lock, brought the squad into a room, and told them that if any player didn't have the stomach for the 22-match two-month tour of a divided country, they could walk out the door, no questions asked.
None did, of course, and the tourists went through the tour undefeated - winning 21 of the matches and drawing one (the fourth test in Johannesburg).
The scoreboard was kind to them, but the various opposing teams were not.
A retrospective in the Guardian read: "Before the match against Eastern Province in 1974, the fourth of the Lions tour, the then South Africa coach, Johan Claassen, was reported to have gone into the home dressing room and instructed the players to pound the Lions into the dust. It was an exhortation that was taken literally. The second row Gordon Brown, finding himself on the floor, was butted in the face and there were so many incidents off the ball that Gareth Edwards asked the Province captain, Hannes Marais, to get his players to cut out the cheap shots.
"Nothing happened and the Lions, for the first, but not the last, time that tour yelled '99', the injunction which meant that every player stopped and whacked the opponent nearest to him, drawing the referee's attention but not risking the chance of anyone being dismissed because every player would have to go."
The story, naturally, has grown in the re-telling, but it is based on truth, and the fact that it did grow into myth helped the Lions' cause as far as McBride was concerned.
"The history of it really comes from my previous tours," he said in a recent interview. "There were always bad boys on the opposite teams. In 1962 we lost [first-half] Richard Sharp who was our star player. We had a lot of incidents and a number of injuries.
"In 1968 we again had incidents in South Africa. The '99' call was invented in 1974 when I was captain and indeed it was my idea. I remember this game and it was against Eastern Province and I got a nod that there were a couple of bad boys in this team and before our first test, which was the following week, there might be some things happen, that they might take one of our key players out.
"I had a talk with the team before the game and warned them of this. I said, 'I hope it doesn't happen but it could happen and we're going to be prepared for it this time because we don't want this sort of play'.
"I said, 'right guys, if this happens we're all in it. All of us. We stand together, no hand bags stuff, this will be for real... we will teach them a lesson not to mess [with us]'.
Sure enough, after half an hour Gareth [Edwards] got the ball from us from a lineout, he passed it away, a guy came through the lineout long after the ball had gone and 'bang', he got it. Gareth's a tough guy but they laid him out on the ground.
"I had said before this, if there's a '99' call we're all in. "I'll never forget, there was devastation on that field, literally, in seconds.
"From then on it became a myth. I think that was the only game in which the '99' call was used and from my point of view that's all I really wanted."
