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For a man who was banned from rugby for life twice, Chris Jones hasn’t made a bad contribution to the game in Wales.

By his own admission, the former hooker was wild man as a player, someone who would think nothing of punching, kicking, gouging or stamping on an opponent.

He even carried an axe around with him in his kit-bag as he looked to live up to his hard man reputation and he was twice banned “sine die” for his violent behaviour.

Jones continued to wreak havoc both on and off the field when he moved into coaching and he now acknowledges he was completely out of control.

But after finding God in a police cell in Brecon, he proceeded to turn his life around in the most remarkable fashion.

He has gone on to be one of the most successful junior coaches the game has ever seen, winning the Dewar Shield nine times with Rhondda Schools and developing a host of future regional and international players.

It’s a tale of rugby redemption, an extraordinary story of one man’s journey back from the dark side that was first told by WalesOnline back in 2015.

It’s also a no-holds barred account of just what valleys rugby was like in the old amateur era.

Jones is quick to stress he takes no pride in the way he used to behave on the field, but he feels to an extent he was a product of his environment.

“There is a forgotten story about the toughness of valleys rugby,” he explains.

“It does make me smile when I hear the old internationals from the 1960s and 70s talking about how tough some of the Test matches were back then.

“You hear people talking about the 1974 Lions tour of South Africa and the 99 call. Because it was on the international stage, it was seen as awful.

“But every single game was like that in the valleys back then. You’d have those kind of fights about 10 times in a match. Games were gladiatorial.

“I saw things and took part in things on a rugby field where you really would get arrested today.

The fights that were never reported

“I saw a second row take a ball off a kick off and get kicked between his shoulder blades. I saw two packs form up to go down in a scrum and, while the referee’s attention was drawn to an injured player, the tight-head prop on one side kicked the opposing tight-head in the face.

“I saw fights all the time. When we played the game, it was often in front of a handful of people on a dank, wet, misty winter afternoon and there was one referee and no neutral linesmen.

“So all you did was wait for the referee to turn his back and then boot, punch, stamp, gouge and whatever you wanted to. That was the way it was and every team had its hard men.

“You had the Treorchy back row of the early 1970s whose boast was that no half-backs had scored against them for three years and they put 11 outside-halves off the field during that time.

“There was a back rower called Phil Wild - what a name for a flanker! - you had John The Punch, a hooker for Ystrad Rhondda, and another hooker called Dai Tank. The names just said it all.

“Up in Treherbert, maybe the hardest of the lot, there was a tight-head prop called Andy Millard. He was fearsome. The battle of Tynewydd Park, when he had a fight with the Wales prop John Richardson, is still legendary. They were fighting in the changing rooms after they had been sent off!

“These fellows were my role models. Part of it is it suited my personality and my temperament, but they were also all looked up to. Even though they might have been officially frowned on by the officials of the clubs, secretly they were the folk-heroes of the valleys communities.

“Treorchy was well known for being a frightening place to go and play rugby in those days. But every club had its tough guys, Wattstown, Ystrad Rhondda, all these teams in the valleys did.

The infamous local derbies

“And for the local derbies the whole communities came out.

“Treorchy would play Treherbert on Christmas Day and Boxing Day! Can you imagine that?

“There would be thousands of people there watching the game, if you could call it a game.

"It was just mayhem a lot of the time.

“There was real feeling about those matches. They were probably the hardest of the lot.

“There were people in Treorchy that wouldn’t shop in Treherbert. If they needed a pint of milk they would by-pass the village and go elsewhere. That’s what it was like.”

Jones was an openside flanker throughout his school days, making the Wales U15s and U19s squads, but then switched to hooker in his late teens at Treorchy RFC.

By that point, he was already something of a wild child on the field and moving into the dark world of the front row was hardly likely to calm him down.

“I suppose I was already a bit of a handful by then,” he admits.

“When I started to play, at about 11 or 12, my father brought a book home from the library called The Unsmiling Giants.

“It was about the 1967 All Blacks tour of Britain and this character Colin Meads and how he would trample over his own players to win the ball from rucks and how he wouldn’t take a backward step against anyone. He was my ultimate rugby role model.

“So I approached the game with that type of attitude right from when I started playing.

“Obviously, as well, growing up in the valleys, it’s a tough environment. There were still coal mines operating there when I was a kid.

“It was the law of the jungle. The game was hard and you had to be tough to survive in it.

“I was prepared to do absolutely anything - boot, punch, kick, gouge, whatever it took.

“I had a terrible reputation. Absolutely terrible. People used to call me a psychopath and a wild man.

“It’s nothing to boast about. It’s just the way that it was.

“There were so many players sent off at Treorchy at one time that the WRU shut the club for two weeks.

“Lyn Jones once said everybody in the Rhondda is hard - the grannies, the babies, everyone.

“But I have to admit, I did like fighting when I was younger. I was a fitness fanatic and found I was quite good at it.”

Jones concedes that as his notoriety grew, so he began to play up to it.

“I used to carry an axe in my kit bag,” he reveals.

“I don’t know how that started. It was just a crazy, mad, mad time.

“I do remember I chased Nigel Bezani around Tylorstown Rugby Club with it once.

“It was just stupid. It was just adding to my reputation. I didn’t carry it around all the time, mind you.”

It was inevitable that Jones’ violent approach was going to catch up with him eventually and so it proved as he found himself in increasing hot water on the disciplinary front.

Things really started to spiral out of control during the Boxing Day derby against Treherbert in 1982.

“One of their players stamped on my brother Clive’s head,” recalls Jones.

“I couldn’t believe the referee hadn’t sent him off, so I went and belted the guy who did it.

“The ref started to send me off and I wouldn’t give him my name and I pushed him and everything else. Then I refused to go off.

“I was wanting to fight the crowd and I ran up the side of the mountain. It was just madness.

“I had been sent off a lot of times before that, but that led to a six month ban.”

After just a few games back, having served his suspension, Jones found himself in trouble again during a notorious cup clash against Cardiff.

“Four of us got sent off, three from Treorchy and their prop Jeff Whitefoot,” he said.

“I was sent off for fighting with Jeff.

“That was on the telly and Clive Norling was refereeing. Coming on the back of the six month ban, the WRU felt they had to do something, so they banned me for life.”

But that wasn’t to be the end of his colourful career. Far from it.

“I had been out of the game for about 18 months when I decided to write a letter of appeal to the WRU,” he said.

“I told them I was sorry and asked if they would let me back.”

Were you sorry?

“No, not at all!”

Either way, it worked and he was allowed to resume playing, only for the red mist to descend again as he laid out an opposition player just a few games into his comeback.

“I really belted this guy,” he said.

“I think he was unconscious going off the field. I am really not proud of that.

“I didn’t actually get sent off in that game. The ref didn’t see it.

“I remember him saying to me ‘If you had anything to do with that, I ought to send you off.’

“I told him I had nothing to do with it. But my thumb was bleeding all over the place from where I’d cut it punching the guy and I was getting it bandaged up so I could throw the ball in!”

As it turned out, Jones didn’t escape punishment, as he was banned for life a second time after a complaint was made to the WRU about the incident.

That resulted in him embarking on a campaign to try and overturn the Union verdict.

“I had this T-shirt done, with ‘Chris Jones is Innocent’ on it,” he said.

“But I wasn’t innocent at all. I did do it.

“I was going back and fore to the Union for months. It was like the WRU couldn’t have a committee meeting without me sitting in on it.

“It took about a year, but eventually the ban was lifted.”

So how does he now reflect on the way he behaved out on the field?

“I am definitely not proud of it when I look back,” he said.

“But it was just the way rugby was played in the valleys at that time.

“Was it right? Absolutely not. But it was a brutal game, played by some very good players but also by some brutal ones. Valleys rugby was really violent.

“I was part of that and I definitely looked to live up to the reputation as the hardest or the maddest.

“It’s not something I look back on with pride. But it was the way it was. I felt it was the way to survive in the game at the level we played at.”

While Jones was once again free to play after the second life ban was overturned, he was now into his 30s and struggling with his back.

Jones the coach

So he soon opted to hang up his boots and join his brother Clive in coaching first Treorchy and then Pontypridd. Not that it meant an end to the skullduggery.

“I was just as mad as a coach in those days,” he admits.

“I coached exactly the same as I played.

“The way we viewed Ponty when we took over in the late 80s was basically as a soft touch. I just thought we had to toughen them up down there.

“So we had some brutal training sessions and, basically, I wouldn’t pick a forward unless he was prepared to kick somebody in the head.

“We played a rucking game based on a New Zealand pattern. From an intimidation point of view, all eight players would hit the ruck and you could cause all kinds of mayhem.

“You had some players who deliberately set out to kill the ball and the way we dealt with that was to give them a good shoeing. So we had some wars.”

Jones was something of a loose cannon off the field as well.

“I was someone completely out of control, I suppose,” he admits.

“I think I was just disillusioned in lots of ways. There was a sense of bitterness and lack of fulfilment.

“I’d wasted my education. People said I would play for Wales and it didn’t happen.

“Was I an angry person? That’s for a psychologist to work out.”

Whatever the reasons, things came to a head in 1990 when he was involved in an incident at the Brecon Jazz Festival. It was to prove the turning point in his life.

“I was stuck in a police cell and charged with violent disorder and wounding with intent,” he recalls.

“I was facing a jail sentence and I was frightened, but most of all I was ashamed.

“I had time to reflect, stuck in the cells, and I looked back on my life and thought I had just been a waster in everything I had been involved in. I came to a point of thinking I really wanted to change.

“It was then I had a born-again, spiritual experience. It’s difficult to explain to someone who has never had that type of experience or who doesn’t believe. But it was real to me.

“I never heard any choirs of angels, I never saw any flashing lights, but I did have a feeling that it was what I have been looking for. It was a good feeling, a feeling of peace.

“I hadn’t wanted to know about God before. If there was a God, why would he help someone like me?

“But God helped me that day. I told him I was really sorry for the way I had lived my life and that if he could help me to change then I would commit my life to him.

“That was the turning point.

Going to church

“I came back from Brecon and I wanted to learn more about this experience. I started to go to church, they gave me a bible, I started to read about Jesus Christ and decided this was someone really worth committing my life to.”

The court case following the Brecon incident saw him found guilty of violent disorder, but the other charge was dropped and he ended up with a fine, allowing him to forge ahead with his new life, including during charity work out in Romania.

Initially, that life didn’t involve rugby at all.

“I stayed out of rugby for a year because I thought it was the cause of my problems,” he explained.

“But then a pastor at the church I go to persuaded me to get back involved. He said it wasn’t rugby that was the problem, it was me.

“So I got involved coaching Treorchy during the so-called Dream years in the early 1990s. It was a really enjoyable time.

“Out of that, came the idea that we needed to start coaching in the local schools and produce our own players because we couldn’t continue to buy them in.

“They needed someone to front up the work. I had recently become a Christian and I just thought it was a great opportunity for me to put my faith into action in my local community.”

From The Dream to the Rhondda Schools miracle

That was in 1993 and it was to be the start of a hugely productive spell coaching Rhondda Schools, a job he continues to do on a full-time basis today.

“We have had great success over the years,” said Jones, who is quick to acknowledge the financial support of Bernard Jones and the coaching support from Neil Boobyer, who has worked alongside him for more than a decade,

“We have won the Dewar Shield nine times since 1999 at U15s level.

“We have had 84 boys who have played for the Wales age group teams, U16s, U18s and U20s.

“We have got around about 40 boys that now play professional rugby and five of them have become full internationals - Matthew Rees, Morgan Stoddart, Rhys Gill, Andrew Bishop and Lou Reed.

“We coach in about 35 of the primary schools in the Rhondda on a fortnightly basis and we coach in the six comprehensive schools on a weekly basis. It works out we coach about 1,000 school children every fortnight.

“The most important thing for me is that rugby is a vehicle. I want the boys we coach to be the best they can be as people.

“We encourage them with self-discipline and self-esteem. We emphasis work ethic and team values, which are good qualities not just to help you be a better rugby player, but to be a better citizen.

“Some will go on to be professional players, but others it’s just trying to keep them on the straight and narrow.”

So what does Jones, now 57, say to any young tearaway rugby player he comes across who reminds him of his old self?

“I just say there is a better way of doing it and living your life on and off the field,” he said.

And what would the old Chris make of the current Chris?

“He wouldn’t believe it!” he admits.

“Chris Jones going to church regularly and not swearing? Never!

“But I have an inner peace, an inner contentment and a meaning to my life now, which I never had before. My faith has given me that and I believe it motivates me to do the work I am involved in now.

“It just shows, if I can change, anyone can change.”