From the rugby bestiary's strict prescription of what a top-flight hooker should be - short, fat bloke; anger management issues optional - it is fair to assume that those who excel in the role are more likely to be born to it than made. Fair, that is, until you consider the case of Ross Ford, now close to establishing himself as Scotland's No 1 at number two, for whom nurture has been more influential than nature in shaping him for the position.
Which is not to say that his genetic inheritance was ever likely to direct him towards a career as a jump jockey or to cox the Oxford eight, for the rugby jungle drums were already rumbling reports of the improbable man-child figure that was Ford in his early years at Kelso High School. Yet if the tree-trunk thighs and the triangular torso distinguished him then as an outstanding teenage loose forward, the fact he stopped growing at just a shade over 6ft suggested he might struggle to make a similar impact in the senior game.
Tony Gilbert, the New Zealander who coached the Border Reivers when they were revived in 2002, was the first to see Ford's front-row potential and set about persuading the player that a move from the periphery of the scrum to its very heart could be rewarding. It was an agonising decision for the young Ford, a dynamic and ball-handling flanker as a schoolboy international, and his earliest outings in his adopted position were hardly propitious.
His modest nature as much as his commitment to self-improvement would always steer Ford away from claiming that he is even close to being the finished article, but he has travelled far enough from those coltish beginnings to recall them without a wince: "It was a sharp learning curve for me," he says, on a break from Scotland's training camp at St Andrews. "There were a few times after games when I thought I was living a nightmare and wondered what I had done.
"When I started at hooker, there were a few times when I felt I had made the wrong decision. It was a difficult transition because a loose forward handles the ball a lot and runs different lines, so I had to get used to being less involved in broken play. It took about two or three years before I was really up to speed, and in a way I'm still getting used to it, figuring out how I can be most effective in the position."
Ford's recollections confirm a lingering impression from those early games that he was almost playing by numbers, reading his contribution from a script. While he honed his physique to create massive upper-body strength, there was still a regimental stiffness about his play, a conspicuous unwillingness to do things off the cuff. As his self-confidence has grown, and the technical skills of the hooker have become ingrained, Ford looks increasingly capable of establishing himself as one of the best in the world in that field.
Now 23, all but one of his 10 caps have been earned as a substitute, but he has reached the point where he must consider his apprenticeship to be over. If that obligation was not already obvious when he checked in for Scotland's lengthy World Cup build-up programme two months ago, it became abundantly clear when Dougie Hall, Scotland's first-choice hooker in the recent RBS Six Nations, was cruelly ruled out of rugby's global gathering by a serious knee injury. Sale-bound Scott Lawson is still a contender, but Ford, who looks set to move into Lawson's vacated berth at Glasgow, appears to have the edge at the moment.
Harsh as the blow to Hall was, surely Ford had mixed feelings about his rival being removed from the reckoning? "Not really, I just felt really sorry for him," he replies. "He had done all that training, had worked really hard and was looking really fit. It was a real shame that it happened to him when it did.
"But it happened to me in the Six Nations last year, when I did my knee in, so I know what he's going through. It was a shock when he went, and I suppose it did mean that another competitor had been removed, but Fergus Thomson, the Glasgow hooker came in and that's another situation to deal with."
Next week's Murrayfield Test against Ireland will be massively significant in finalising the make-up of the 30-man World Cup squad which must be whittled down from the training group of 38 and submitted to tournament organisers by August 14. Coach Frank Hadden seems uncertain about whether to include two or three hookers - and scrum-halves for that matter - but Ford acknowledges that the issue of making the cut has come to dominate the Scotland camp.
"I suppose the atmosphere does begin to get a bit nervy," he smiles. "When you start, you're just getting on with things, trying to do your work, but as it gets closer and closer you wonder if you've done everything you could to put yourself forward. Everyone is working hard to make that selection, but we all seem to be dealing with it quite well."
Ford's enjoyment of the gym environment helped to hasten his metamorphosis from flanker to hooker, but even he could sense the danger of a bad dose of stir-craziness during the conditioning period of the World Cup preparations and has been happy to get back on the training pitch to hone his core rugby skills.
"For five weeks we did nothing but fitness training," he says. "That does get a bit frustrating, having no rugby whatsoever. Now that we are actually playing a bit of rugby you can see that the boys are getting some of that frustration out of the system. It's been good to get back into it.
"Physically, we are one of the best-prepared teams around now. We're in the best shape we've ever been, so we can match anyone physically. It's just a matter of taking the things we can do on the training pitch into a genuinely competitive match.
"If I'm picked against Ireland it will be nice to be back in that arena again, having the match-day build-up and the crowd and everything. We've had these practice games here, but it's not the same as going up against a team of that class. They're a good side, but if we can put together what we've been doing in training then we should have a good chance."
Reid's article can be read online here.