When the Big Apple came calling for Lyn

Many today will associate him with his title-winning years at the helm of Neath and the Ospreys. It can therefore be easy to forget how highly rated he was as an out-and-out openside flanker.

A glowing profile on Jones in the Independent in 1993, ahead of winning his first cap, carries a telling quote from his then Neath manager, Brian Thomas: “Lyn Jones is the fittest, fastest, cleverest and best back-row forward in Britain.” The same article refers to him as ‘the Neil Back of Welsh rugby’.

Whatever the feelings of the press – or the Gnoll or Stradey faithful, since Jones played for both rival clubs – when his talents were at last recognised by the Welsh selectors, even he felt it was too late. “I was empty, actually,” he says today. “I played for Wales at a time when I was perhaps past my best. I was 29. I think I was at my peak around 27. Other responsibilities surpass your sport, like children and business, but that’s life.”

The last of his five international appearances came against Canada in the same year (more on that later), and while he was in the frame for the 1994 Five Nations, fate had other plans. “I pulled my hamstring over Christmas ’93 while training on my own, and it took me a lot longer than it should have to recover. In the meantime, guys like Mark Perego came in and played really well.” It was a tournament Wales would go on to win.

Given all that he achieved in the 1992/93 season – including Llanelli’s famous win against Australia – it seems counterintuitive that he was experiencing a physical emptiness the entire time. Conveniently for Jones, rugby wasn’t an all-consuming part of his life.

“Back in 1993, rugby was still an amateur game which I took seriously,” he says. “It certainly didn’t stand in the way of other things in your life: you had a job, and your job came first; you trained on a Tuesday and on a Thursday, and that’s how it was.”

Which is how talk of running a marathon came about.

“Nigel Andrews, a business partner of mine, suggested we do the New York City Marathon,” explains Jones. “So we signed up for it about a year out from the event.”

Jones had earlier been part of a Neath side that was at the vanguard of employing distance running as part of their training – an antithetical approach to today’s standards – and was something of a road-running enthusiast himself.

“Running was my forte, and we didn’t really do weights back then,” he says. “There were some exceptions to the rule – players like Richard Webster, Phil Davies and Gareth Llewellyn who did weight training – but I just didn’t understand why. We were all skinny people playing rugby, and everyone could run around for 80 minutes because that was the idea 27 years ago.”

He recalls his excitement at the prospect of running the streets of the Big Apple: “I’d been to New York in the past and we had big plans to train for it, but I was always fit anyway through rugby so I was confident I’d be able to achieve it.”

JPR Williams may have blazed a trail for long distance-running rugby players when he completed the maiden London Marathon in 1981, the commentator wryly lauding the “stocky mesomorph” as he crossed the finish line. But Jones’s best laid training plans came to naught when he was selected for Wales’ 1993 tour to Zimbabwe and Namibia (read about that here). “The marathon was put on the back burner. For five months my focus was on my business and my rugby.”

As time went on, the likelihood of the world’s largest marathon becoming a mere social event for Jones grew.

“We were fully planning on watching from the sidelines, and that’s how it was progressing until the night before the event,” he says. He and Nigel had been bouncing from bar to bar across New York City for two days and were now somewhat worse for wear in a Manhattan watering hole.

“We were talking to this gentleman who was 60 years of age and going to run the marathon. I asked him what time he was aiming for, to which he replied, ‘Six-and-a-half hours’. So I turned to my partner and said, ‘If he can do it, we are doing it’.”

Deciding to run a marathon after 48 hours on the tiles is one thing. Doing so four days after playing in a gruelling Test match against the famously physical Canadians is another.

“If it was a game played today, Canada would have had about eleven players left on the field,” Jones remarks. That Neil Jenkins kicked what was then a world record eight penalties that day supports his opinion. “That was life at the time: all they were doing was giving penalties away to stop us playing and scoring tries. We could have played better and we had opportunities to close the game out, but a couple of people were perhaps super positive we could carry on playing.”

That empty feeling he described had never felt more real as the clock wound down. “I was absolutely shattered,” he says. “I’ve never been so tired in all my life coming to the end of a game. We received the ball in the last minute of the game and I thought, ‘Please kick it into the stand and let’s get off the field’. And we started counterattacking. God alive.

“We got turned over, but then got another chance to kill the game off and the same thing happened. I was out on my feet and eventually they scored under our posts.”

Against all odds, the Canucks had sealed a 26-24 victory against a strong Welsh team featuring men like Scott Gibbs, Wayne Proctor, and Scott Quinnell (winning his first cap). “Today they would have had four yellow cards, but the referee [Ireland’s Owen Doyle] just kept blowing his whistle.”

His most vivid recollection of the match is the relentless fatigue. If he felt in turmoil on the Cardiff Arms Park turf that afternoon, it only served as a taste of what was to come four days later on the streets of New York City.

“The following morning, and this is God’s honest truth, we got up the run the marathon with a hangover,” says Jones. “To this day I still don’t know what we were thinking!”

The combination of the unseasonably warm mid-November weather and the unfeasibly early start did nothing to help Jones’s post-night out disposition. “It was boiling, one of the hottest marathons they’d had.” Despite the organisers moving the event back to its latest ever date, more than 50 runners were hospitalised due to the heat.

Then again, it wasn’t like Jones was expecting to repeat the heroics of his namesake Steve from Ebbw Vale who had won the race five years earlier. (Jones the Olympian held the British marathon record for an astounding 33 years until April 2018, when it was finally broken by Sir Mo Farah.) But neither did he want to run it in the same time as the man twice his age in the bar the night before.

“My business partner had the great idea of pushing his way to the front so he could avoid the bustle of the pack,” Jones says. “But the whole race starts on the bridge from Staten Island, which is a bottleneck, so he was actually leading after half a mile because he couldn’t get off the road to let others through!”

Jones wore a t-shirt featuring the name of a local character in Neath, the singer Ernie Bop, who had just released a single. “He lived near me and was a Neath rugby fanatic,” says Jones. “He thought he was Elvis Presley. I didn’t think anything of wearing the t-shirt until all the supporters started shouting ‘Come on, Ernie!’ as I passed them by.”

He hit the dreaded wall after fourteen miles. “I still had twelve miles to go. It was torture. As I crossed the bridge over onto Manhattan Island my legs were going. I thought ‘I’ve still got to go up First Avenue, I’ve got to get off Long Island, come back through Bronx’. It was really difficult. But what a wonderful experience.”

There’s a chance Jones could have run past the young couple who made a quick stop eight miles into the marathon that year to get married on the steps of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

What he does fondly remember are the supportive crowds that greeted the runners as they made their way through the five boroughs of the city. “It’s a beautiful memory that I have,” he says, although the nostalgia doesn’t extend to the physical ordeal he went through in order to make it to the finish line. “I ended up coming in at five hours and twenty-seven minutes. I thought I was going to die, my heart was pumping through my chest so hard.

“But it was a PB for me, and still is!”

The enormous sense of achievement would ultimately come at a cost for Jones. “Running the marathon ended my playing career prematurely,” he admits. “My groin was never the same after that. It’s called Symphysis pubis, and the doctors told me at the time that I needed to have an operation if I wanted to carry on playing.

“My wife was pregnant with our son, Luc, and I really didn’t want to go through with having an operation and all that it entailed.” By then, he had become something of a marquee signing for the ultra-ambitious Treorchy Zebras, with whom he would produce some shock results that season – not least against Llanelli. “I played a couple of months on some tablets but it was just going downhill for me and I was fighting to stay in there.”

When an operation seemed inevitable, luck presented itself in the form of his dear old club. “Neath were at my door asking me to coach them,” says Jones. “It was something I’d always wanted to do, even above playing, so I took that opportunity and hung up my boots at just 31 years of age.”

Today, Jones is the head coach of the Russian national team. It should come as no surprise that he’s turned up in a faraway land; a place that is subject to such intense media speculation. Even so, Jones concedes, “Russia was a place I never thought I’d go to.”

His desire to see the world was there to see during his playing career. First in 1985 when he gave up his job in the steelworks to play rugby in South Africa (“it was a country that intrigued me and I wanted to know more”), then in 1990 when he and his wife took a year out to travel the world (“fulfilling all the promises we’d made to people to visit them”).

Even his time working at a school in Abu Dhabi from 2009 to 2011 served to expand his views on coaching. “I learnt to see the difference between management and leadership,” Jones says. “The school principal, Mr Coackley, asked me on day one what my job was. I replied, “To coach rugby”.

“‘No’, he said. ‘It’s to inspire young people’. It was almost an epiphany moment that changed my professional outlook.

“Coaches can be guilty early on in their careers of being ambitious and doing what’s best for them. Now I’m into improving and doing what’s best for the players.”

He was delighted to see Alun Wyn Jones become the most capped player in world rugby earlier this month. “I finished with the Ospreys in 2008, a long time ago,” says Jones. “When Alun Wyn retires, that’s it. There are no players left there that I coached.”

He allows himself a moment of contemplation every now and again. “Just to stand in the middle of the beautiful Red Square and look around, to understand where I am in the world, gives me huge pleasure, much joy and satisfaction.”

A coaching career is a marathon, then, and not a sprint. There is a lot more to come from Lyn Jones.