Fighting to Speak - Rugby, Rage and Redemption

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Mae Fighting to Speak yn portreadu taith mab i lowr oedd ag atal dweud, ond a lwyddodd i chwarae rygbi i lefel uchel ac i goncro ei frwydrau mewnol.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

Fighting to Speak reveals the journey of a miner's son with a stutter who succeeded to play rugby at the highest level and defeat his demons.

Dosbarthu

Byddwn yn dosbarthu eitemau sydd mewn stoc o fewn 3 diwrnod gwaith, fel arfer drwy Royal Mail Tracked 48. Ar gyfer archebion o flaen llaw, byddwn yn dosbarthu’r eitem o fewn 3 diwrnod gwaith ar ôl ei derbyn gan ein cyflenwr.

Dispatch

In-stock items will be dispatched within 3 business days, usually by Royal Mail Tracked 48. For pre-orders, we’ll dispatch within 3 business days of receiving the item from our supplier.

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

On the rugby field, the line separating the hard man from the thug has always been the most tenuous of boundaries. Here in this, the bravest of autobiographies, Mark Jones – sent off six times and banned for 33 weeks for violent conduct during an illustrious career – accepts his thuggery. But in doing so he elevates himself to the status of hero. The Jekyll and Hyde behaviour of this indomitable Number Eight is as brutal in its honesty as Jones himself admits to having been on the rugby field. That brutality was the direct consequence of the debilitating stammer that has haunted him all his life. The autobiography opens with a statement that sets the tone for what is to follow. It is dedicated, he says, to all the people who have been abused, taunted and laughed at, or simply made to feel inferior and self-conscious, because of their stammer. And we have all been guilty of that. Oh, how we have laughed, for instance, at shopkeeper Arkwright’s antics in Open All Hours . In a forthright preface, one of Jones’s closest friends, Kingsley Jones, describes how Mark could occasionally be a ruthless and brutal man, ‘a pig of a man’, a ‘dumb thug’. That, he says, was his on-field mask, which hid ‘a highly intelligent and caring man with a huge heart’. This huge heart is opened wide for all of us to examine. We learn that unlike the dual personality of the central character in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde , there were three Mark Joneses. There was the ‘on-the-field Mark’, the ‘after-the-game Mark’, and the ‘at-home Mark’. Most people could only recognise the first two. Jones reveals how he decided to confront his demon face to face. He finally realised that fighting it actually strengthened it. It was feeding off the negative energy he was generating. His coming out became a therapeutic process, and it immediately led to media attention. It was his epiphany, his resurrection. He could breathe again. One of the closing sentences of the back-cover blurb encapsulates perfectly the essence of this remarkable testament to redemption: ‘Mark Jones fought and won the hardest battle of his life with a steely determination and has now found the inner peace and dignity he’d longed for as a young man.’ What a man! And what a book!