Jonathan Phillips was inducted into the Welsh Sports Hall of Fame in April
By Terry Phillips
Former Sheffield Steelers and Cardiff Devils ice hockey forward Jonathan Phillips has joined a unique sporting group in Wales.
Phillips has earned a place alongside many of Wales’ most successful sporting stars.
He was joined by 60 other guests at the ceremony in Cardiff including former Devils team-mates Matthew Myers and Neil Francis.
I was also on the table with the Welsh trio, all born in Cardiff, for a lunch which lasted almost three hours.
The former Steelers captain stands alongside Sir Gareth Edwards, JPR Williams, Ryan Giggs, John Toshack, Ray Reardon, Gary Speed and more after being inducted into the Welsh Sports Hall of Fame.
He joined the Hall of Fame during a lunch at the Parkgate Hotel in Cardiff which is next to the Millennium Stadium.
Olympic gold medallist Lynn Davies played a major part in the proceedings. ‘Lynn the Leap’, now aged 82, won his Olympic crown during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.
Nigel Walker, a former Welsh track and field athlete who played international rugby union for Wales and later became chief executive officer of the Welsh Rugby Union, was also among the guests.
Cardiff City FC were among other award winners during the lunch on Thursday, April 10 and they were represented by former chairman Steve Borley plus ex-players including Bobby Woodruff and Roger Gibbins.
Phillips drove down from his home in Sheffield for the lunch and stayed overnight in Cardiff before heading home to Yorkshire.
He is an ice hockey forward who won League titles, play-off championships and World Championship gold medals during a playing career which started when he was a 16-year-old schoolboy.
Phillips earned well over 100 Great Britain international caps and played in more than 1,000 Elite League appearances.
He is the first ice hockey player to join the Welsh Sports Hall of Fame.
‘Jono’ called a halt to his professional hockey playing career a couple of years ago and started a new job outside the sport as inclusion manager for the Cavendish Learning Trust.
He manages the Trust’s integrated resource centre, a role he prepared for by working voluntarily one day a week at Netherthorpe.
He was born a few years before the first ice rink was built in Cardiff city centre during the 1980s and started playing hockey as a teenager.
“I’m going to miss the hell out of the life that I’ve had since I was 16 years old,” he said after deciding to end his Sheffield Steelers playing days.
Phillips, aged 42, is GB’s most capped international, having overtaken Ashley Tait’s haul of 110 caps.
Phillips started his ice hockey life with home city club Cardiff Devils more than 25 years ago before moving to play for Sheffield Steelers in 2006.
Playing hockey transformed his life and he told BBC Sport: “I was never a confident child.
“I was a kid with a stutter who wouldn’t put his hand up in class even if I knew the answer.
“Being around that team environment where everybody’s working together, hockey teaches you to be resilient and to have confidence.
“Hockey gave me so many life lessons.”
Phillips grew up the Ely area of Cardiff and remembers how he began to fall in love with hockey, saying: “When I was around eight or nine-years-old my uncle Kevin took me to a Cardiff Devils game against Murrayfield Racers as a birthday present and I absolutely loved it
“Then, a couple of years later, my mum (Alison) signed me up with the junior Devils and I became obsessed.
“I spent hours in the street stick-handling with golf balls, roller-hockey balls and little plastic pucks. I’d set up a few cans on the curb and keep trying to shoot the cans off in between the cars – that kind of thing.
“A couple of headlights were broken, which we had to pay for, but every spare second I was out in the street just doing something to try and get better.
“When I was about 14 Devils created a second team, Cardiff Rage and then Paul Heavey, Devils’ head coach, invited me to make up the numbers in training.”
He was signed by the Devils on a full-time contract aged 17.
Phillips is particularly thankful to his mother, Alison, saying: “Mum sacrificed everything for me to play hockey.
“She’d finish work on a Friday, drive me to Peterborough for an 11pm training session with a junior England team and then straight back.
“Next day she would take me to a midday game in Cardiff, all those things that you take for granted when you’re younger.
“Her hard work and dedication gave me the chance to achieve my dream.”
Phillips and his wife, Kirsty, who is from the Aber Valley mining village of Senghennydd around four miles from Caerphilly, are proud to be Welsh, but he says: “We are completely settled in Sheffield and we’re here for life.”
Phillips’ first taste of senior hockey came in Cardiff, during the latter days of Superleague.
The play-off finals in 2008 were special for Phillips and he said: “I used to go and watch the play-offs at Wembley with Devils and to then be on that stage playing for the first time is something I’ve never forgotten.”
“I loved playing hockey and everything about it. The experiences I had, the people I’ve met, I wouldn’t change for anything.”
I sat next to ‘Jono’ during the Welsh Sports Hall of Fame dinner and he told me about his early life lessons in the Ely area of Cardiff.
“I was never really into sport that much,” he said.
“Confidence-wise I was scared I was going to be the worst kid.”
Phillips attended college, but, in his own words, ‘absolutely hated it’, and then Devils coach Heavey rang saying ‘We want you to train full-time, but we can’t offer you a contract yet. I jumped at the chance.’
The next morning Phillips rang his college to say he wouldn’t be back and caught a bus into practice each day. He would then get something to eat and go to the gym before working in Cardiff’s River Island clothes shop 2pm-6pm.
He earned valuable hockey experience with Devils, Basingstoke Bison, Milton Keynes Kings and Peterborough Phantoms before opting for a move to Sheffield Steelers.
He told me during the Parkgate lunch: “At the time a newspaper headline said ‘Phillips Moves for Love’ because, apparently, I’d met someone up in Sheffield.
“That was absolute rubbish. My wife is from Senghenydd in South Wales.”
Phillips adored his playing career and loved playing for GB, saying: “It was the tightest group of guys I was ever a part of.”
Now Phillips still skates for Sheffield Steeldogs when possible, while his sons, Oshan and Albie, love to skate.
Phillips was not told why he was invited to the Welsh Sports Hall of Fame lunch this month and was surprised when he was inducted into a unique group of sporting stars.
He loved becoming the first ice hockey player to join footballers, rugby guys, Olympic athletes and many more.
It is an honour he thoroughly deserved.