‘Mad’ Mark stumbles on answer for his rage

DURING the course of an eventful career which took him from Neath in the west to Hull in the east, Mark Jones spent part of it in a state of suspension. A shorter fuse would have taken some finding, hence the penalty of recurring inactivity.

Jones, a battering-ram No.8 who emerged in the mid-Eighties, could have come straight out of the old Australian Rugby League school of hard men never afraid to ‘Go the Biff ’.

On one occasion, for Ebbw Vale in a Welsh League match against Pontypridd, he biffed a promising young lock by the name of Ian Gough badly enough to damage an eye-socket which required surgical repair.

A remorseful Jones sent Gough a letter apologising for ‘a thoughtless, stupid and violent act’. He also wrote about how much he respected Gough as a player and liked him as a person but one sentence stood out above the rest: “I realise now that I have a problem that I need to correct.’’

It may have seemed, on the surface, to have been a statement of the blindingly obvious. It was nothing of the kind, as recent events have shown.

A few weeks ago Wales Online ran a starkly revealing interview with Jones by Simon Thomas of the Western Mail. In the course of confessing to have been ‘a rugby sociopath’, Jones admitted the motivation behind his more controversial actions on the field came from an innate anger at being cursed from childhood by a stammer.

After all the ridiculing, rugby gave him a means of hitting back. “I hated myself because I wasn’t like other people,’’ he told the BBC documentary on speech impediment, I Can’t Say My Name. “The embarrassment you feel, it’s a constant fight.

“The style of play I had was driven from the stammer. It makes you a bit of an outcast in your head.’’

At 55, Jones is a different man. He works in Qatar as a laboratory technician and coaches rugby.