Post-playing career
When Edwards wrote his autobiography he was branded a "professional" and was temporarily prevented from coaching or being involved in any way with the sport of rugby union.
From 1978 until 1982 Edwards was a team captain on the TV quiz show A Question of Sport along with Liverpool and England footballer Emlyn Hughes.
In 1997, Edwards was one of the first fifteen former players inducted into the International Rugby Hall of Fame along with (among others) former playing partners Barry John and JPR Williams. He is also the subject of a plaque in the Rugby Pathway of Fame in the town of Rugby, Warwickshire, which is credited as the home of the game.
On 21 November 2001, Edwards was voted the "Greatest Welsh Player of all time" at a rugby dinner held at the Cardiff International Arena by the 'Welsh Rugby Former International Players' Association' and First Press Events company. Voting took place via the Western Mail, South Wales Echo, Wales on Sunday and the nine Celtic Press titles. The public votes were then sifted by a team of experts and a 'crowd' of almost 1,000 packed into the CIA to discover who were the 'Greatest'.
In a poll of international rugby players conducted in 2003 by Rugby World magazine, Edwards was declared the greatest player of all time. Surprisingly, Edwards has admitted that All Black scrum-half Sid Going most likely got the better of him over their seven encounters, "As I say, he was the best I played against and, yes, he probably had the edge on me in the games we played". Edwards does however think that the pack Going was playing behind may have helped, "...I wouldn't have minded playing with the back row the All Blacks had...then Sid might not have come out on top". He now commentates on the game for the BBC and S4C, commentating for the latter in Welsh, his mother tongue, and he is one of several players to have appeared in the S4C series Rygbi a Mwy. He is also a director at the Cardiff Blues region, director of Mercedes dealership Euro Commercials Ltd. and President of Cardiff Institute for the Blind. A sculpture of Gareth Edwards stands in the St David's, Cardiff.
In 1990 he set a British angling record when he landed a pike weighing 45 lb 6oz at Llandegfedd Reservoir near Pontypool. Edwards held the record for two years. He also enjoys shooting game-birds. Edwards was patron of The Richard Hunt Foundation and in 2010 he was named a Patron of the Jaguar Academy of Sport.
In August 2014, Edwards was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue.
In 2019 he appeared, alongside wife Maureen, in the BBC Series Gareth Edwards’s Great Welsh Adventure. The programme returned for a second series in 2021.
In 2003, in a poll of international rugby players conducted by Rugby World magazine, Edwards was declared the greatest player of all time. In 2007, former England captain Will Carling published his list of the '50 Greatest Rugby players' in The Daily Telegraph, and ranked Edwards the greatest player ever, stating; "He was a supreme athlete with supreme skills, the complete package. He played in the 1970s, but, if he played now, he would still be the best. He was outstanding at running, passing, kicking and reading the game. He sits astride the whole of rugby as the ultimate athlete on the pitch."
