As you would expect from someone who played in the back row alongside Tommy David, Lyn Jones and Mark Perego, Gary “Boomer” Jones has a fair few stories to tell.
He also has vivid memories of an international career where every cap he won came in Tests against opponents of the very highest profile.
Born and raised in Porth, Jones focused on football until he was about 17, before linking up with Ystrad Rhondda RFC where he soon flourished, going on to join Pontypridd in 1980. That saw him packing down alongside Wales and Lions star David, which was some experience for a young man just starting out in the game.
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“My first two seasons were with Tommy. That was incredible. It was a tremendous rugby education. He was great on and off the field,” he says.
“I played No 8, with Tommy at 6 and Mike Shellard at 7. The two of them were absolutely fantastic players. Tommy would take so many people out of the game, it would free you up for space. I scored a number of tries like that.
“He would take the three people, then put me into space and I would just coast over. It was funny really. He was tremendous to play with. I saw him just the other day in B&Q and he’s still such a character.”
It was while with Ponty that Jones acquired the nickname of Boomer, by which he is known throughout the game.
“We were on tour in Canada and I bought this baseball bat which had Boomer on it,” he explains. “So Dai Thomas, the club physio, started calling me that. But there was also this seagull in one of the Disney films called Boomer and, in rugby terms, if you are a goal-hanger they call you a seagull. So the boys started calling me it for that then and it’s stuck over the years.”
Jones was indeed to prove himself a prolific goal-hanger - or try-scorer - over his career, touching down around 120 times in all. “I think I was good at anticipating where things were going to happen and where I needed to be and I was quite quick for a tall man.”
He was to make 165 appearances for the Sardis Road side before moving on to Llanelli in 1985, opting to join them ahead of Cardiff.
“From the moment I went into the changing room, they made me so welcome, it was tremendous. I went into the back row with Phil Davies and David Pickering. Phil May was captain and you had Gary Pearce at 10, who absolutely controlled games. He was a brilliant player. So was Jonathan Griffiths at scrum-half.”
Then there were the coaches, Gareth Jenkins and Allan Lewis.
“They were superb together, just tremendous coaches, definitely the best I played under,” he said. “You would have run through a wall for Gareth, 100 per cent. And Allan the same, the two of them. They knew their rugby inside out, but they were very good at motivating as well.
“With Gareth, it was a big help that he had played in the same position as me. He is telling you and he has done it himself. He definitely had the passion, but it wasn’t just that. He knew what he was talking about, he was switched on. He knew what he wanted you to do. It was all clear. You could see he was ahead of his time.”
Jones picks out the 1988 Schweppes Cup final victory over Neath as the highlight of his time with Llanelli, a game where he scored a try in a 28-13 win in front of a 56,000 crowd at the old National Ground.
“That was tremendous. We played really well that day. All the talk in the press before the game was that our pack was a soft touch and Neath would do us up front. I definitely think the Neath players thought that as well, but we blew them away completely. You had Jonathan Davies at 10 then and it goes without saying how good he was. He was absolutely superb.”
Jones’ fine club form had seen him included in the Wales squad for the 1988 Five Nations, which delivered a Triple Crown, but he wasn’t involved in any of the games and then missed out on selection for the summer tour of New Zealand. But, then, fate took a hand, leading to his first cap. The memory remains crystal clear.
“I was working in the house, wall-papering my boy’s bedroom. I had gone over to my mother’s to get a bucket to do the paste. I came back and my wife said ‘You have got to go to New Zealand. Clive Rowlands has just phoned to see if you are available.’
“It shocked me a bit, but you are not going to turn down the chance of a cap or even touring with Wales, so I grabbed it with two hands.”
It was a trip that was to be real wake-up call for Welsh rugby, on the back of the Triple Crown triumph, with the All Blacks scoring more than 50 points in both Tests.
“It was a total eye-opener. The physicality was totally unbelievable. It was just like wave after wave after wave,” says Jones. “Back home, we were training twice a week while holding down full-time jobs. I would be training or playing and then going back to a night shift as a fitter. With these boys out in New Zealand, their jobs revolved around the rugby, not the other way round. They were totally more professional, just streets ahead of us.”
Arriving after the first Test, which had ended in a 52-3 defeat in Christchurch, Jones went straight on to the bench against Taranaki in New Plymouth and was then picked to start against North Auckland on the Tuesday before the second Test. Wales were to lose that midweek match in Whangarei 27-9.
“That game is famous for the bloke playing the Last Post. I was standing underneath the sticks after they scored their third try or something and this bloke was playing the Last Post up on the bank!
“I was thinking ‘Christ, I could be wall-papering the bedroom here like’. It was the game where Jonathan Mason had his shirt totally ripped off with their rucking. It was like he had been in a threshing machine. The No 15 had been raked off and you could just see flesh, like!
“He had been called out to the tour straight after being on holiday in Cyprus. So Jiffy (Jonathan Davies) went over to him and said ‘Jon, I think you are starting to peel! I experienced it as well out there. My shorts were ripped and I had rake marks all over my buttocks.”
Jones was then selected to win his first Welsh cap in the second Test at Auckland’s Eden Park, wearing No 6 in the back row alongside Rowland Phillips and David Bryant. It was to be another heavy defeat, as the All Blacks romped home 54-9.
“One week I was wallpapering the baby’s bedroom, the following week I was up against Shelford, Whetton and Michael Jones!” he says.
“There was massive pride and it was a privilege to play. You are on the other side of the world, you are playing the world champions in Eden Park and you want to do the best you can. But they were just so much better than us. It was like men against boys.
“Jiffy was captain for that second Test and when we came back he wanted to address the Union to say where we needed to be going, which they totally took no notice of. Nothing changed at all. The lessons just didn’t get learned. It’s probably still the same now, with the tail shaking the dog.”
Jones made his Five Nations debut the following February, once again lining up on the blindside flank, during a 31-12 defeat to France in Paris.
“My first two caps were against the world champions and the World Cup runners-up! You had Blanco running from everywhere that day.”
Then came the final game of the Championship at home to England, with Jones retaining the No 6 jersey. It was to be the high point of his Test career as he shared in a memorable 12-9 win in a rain-soaked Cardiff.
“The pressure on that was massive. It was incredible. We had lost the opening three matches, so we were facing a first ever whitewash. It was my first game for Wales in Cardiff and standing there for the anthem was something else. You could see your family in the stand. It was very special.
“It was a damp wet old day and it wasn’t the greatest of games, so I can understand why there’s not much footage of it around. It’s the forgotten game. But I thought we were the better side. Bob Norster and Robert Jones were magnificent that day. I remember before the game, Norster said to me ‘Just keep the 6 and Wade Dooley off me, that’s all you’ve got to do.’
“So, every lineout, I was just stepping across into the channel to stop anyone getting near him and to give him a free jump and he won everything clean. We came off at the end of the game and he said ‘Well done, butt, brilliant’ and I was over the moon with that.”
Jones continued: “The other thing that’s engrained in my mind from that game is something that happened in the second half when they were pressuring us in our 22.
“All of a sudden, I found myself with the ball in my hands with Jeremy Guscott absolutely screaming up on me. I just took the ball and I gave it to Paul Thorburn. Honest to God, it couldn’t have been a metre between the ball and Guscott. It got to Thorburn’s hands and he cleared it down to the halfway line. I still think what would have happened if Guscott had caught that f***ing ball! I have often thought of that.
“My mother keeps cuttings from my career and all that. I’m not sure who did the match report that day, but it says ‘And Gary Jones showed calm instincts in shipping the ball out to Thorburn to clear’. I thought ‘Christ, if you knew how much I was s****ing myself by there!”
With Mike Hall scoring the only try of the match, underdogs Wales held on for a memorable victory, with the final whistle coming as a joyful sound.
“I remember dropping to my knees. It was like that moment in Platoon. You didn’t want to be in the team that had been whitewashed.
“To play against England and win at the Arms Park would probably be every Welshman’s dream and I think we deserved the win. It was a tremendous day and a big night. I can’t remember a lot of it! I just remember going to different bars and it was all back-slapping and all that. It was mental in Cardiff that night. That match and the 1988 cup final are my two best memories from my playing career.”
There were two more caps to come the following season - both at No 7 - at home to New Zealand and France, taking his final tally to five.
“You always wish you had more. There were times where I thought I was playing better than when I was selected. But what I am proud of is who the five caps were against - New Zealand twice, France twice, England once. It would have been nice to have a few more, but I was really happy to have those five.”
While the international spell came to an end, there were still plenty of memorable days at Llanelli in the early 1990s, amid three more cup wins and a league title. A number of those triumphs were enjoyed in the company of fellow flanker Mark Perego, arguably Welsh rugby’s greatest cult hero.
“I was with Perego for a long time. I loved him. He was a one-off,” says Jones. “As a player, he was tremendous. He had that professionalism, exactly the same as the New Zealanders. Defensively, he was absolutely superb, as strong as an ox.
“He was his own man. If the boys were having a beer and he didn’t want to do it, he wouldn’t do it. People used to call him a bit of an oddball, but he was a real nice boy, a fabulous boy. I shared rooms with him many times. He was great fun.
“I will tell you a story. We were on tour in Australia and Fiji with Llanelli. We had beaten Queensland in Ballymore Park and we were given the following day off. We went out and had a couple of beers on a boat trip, but Mark didn’t want to go. When I got back to my room, everything was in darkness, but I could hear a tinny sound, like very quiet music.
“I opened the wardrobe and Pegs was in there sleeping, with his walkman on! I shook him and he said he just wanted to get away from everything and have a couple of hours of complete darkness. That’s what he was like.
“He was just a total one-off. It’s really hard to explain it. But you couldn’t wish to meet a nicer bloke. If you ever met him, you would be glowing about him. He’s brilliant. He phoned me the other day actually. Very rarely will you phone him and he will answer, but he will phone you out of the blue. He spoke as if he was still playing.”
As if packing down alongside Tommy David and Perego wasn’t enough, ‘Boomer’ also shared the back row with another huge character of Welsh rugby in Lyn Jones, a team-mate at Llanelli.
“Lyn was tremendous, again a complete one-off. He was always laughing and joking off the field. There were practical jokes, everything, he was always messing about, always mucking around. And he seemed to know everyone. Wherever you went, he would know someone, through cricket, through rugby. He was a beauty. But then, when it came to the rugby, he was right down the line. The joking stopped then.”
Jones, who also represented the Barbarians, picks out Pontypool’s Chris Huish, Neath’s Phil Pugh, Cardiff duo Gareth Roberts and Bob Lakin and Maesteg’s Ralph Turner as some of his toughest back row opponents, while describing England international Mickey Skinner as “a handful” and naming The Gnoll and Pooler Park as the toughest destinations during his club days.
He left Llanelli in 1994, having scored no fewer than 78 tries in 221 appearances for the Stradey Park outfit. Then came a couple of run outs at Treorchy before he hung up his boots aged 35. Away from the game, he has worked as an aircraft engineer for a number of years and has two sons and four grandchildren, while he is a keen cyclist.
Reflecting finally on what rugby has meant to him, the Porth-based Jones, now 62, says: “It’s opened doors for me and has given me massive friendships. That’s huge, that is. You meet some great characters. It’s just brilliant. You don’t see some people for 30 years and then, when you do meet up, it’s like seeing them yesterday. I’ve got a lot to be thankful to rugby for.”
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