When Jonah Lomu was thundering about South Africa in the 1995 Rugby World Cup, strafing defenders like a road-train through wheat, there’d never been anything like him. Nobody, not even All Blacks great John Kirwan, first of the big wingers, had been as athletic, fast, muscular nor massive. Jonah was an outlier event, a phenomena, a genuine freak. No-one had ever seen anything like him.
Today Jonah clones romp across both codes of rugby. The great Polynesian diaspora has given us surnames chock-full of As, Us and apostrophes, limbs swathed in tribal tattoos, and legions of God-fearing belters, carting it up hard, all high knees at speed. Today Jonah would be almost normal.
Well, he wouldn’t be “normal”. In his prime he’d be a champion still, the big man, given his speed and footwork and thunderous titanium thighs. Yet today if you were watching him trot out for the All Blacks, a huge man light on this feet, slightly swaggering, quadriceps gleaming like the muscles of a golden ox, you wouldn’t be thinking, ‘Dear God look at him. How do you stop that?’.
They didn’t know in ’95. No one knew. It was only food poisoning that stopped him. The 20-year-old scored seven tries in the tournament, equal highest with fellow All Black Marc Ellis who scored six in one game against Japan. Had Lomu played in that 145-17 carve-up of the Cherry Blossoms he might have scored 20 tries. He might have scored 50.
He scored four tries against England in the semi-final and they’re still replaying the one in which he ran over Mike Catt. See it in your mind: All Blacks half Graeme Bachop bobs about base of a ruck and flings a floater out to his left that lands in space. Lomu retrieves on the bounce, discards Rob Andrew with a fend, out-strips Will Carling, and from there, well, you’ve seen what happens from there. Catt gets in the way. Catt gets run over. Catt is roadkill, a speed bump for a monster truck. The big man has been put off-balance slightly when destroying Catt but regains his gait, leaps and plunges over and slams the Gilbert on the Cape Town turf. Then he trots back with a small look on his face that says, ‘How bad am I?’
Watching in Los Angeles was Rupert Murdoch, who knew a global phenomena when he saw one. “Who is that player?” he reportedly asked his minions. “We must have him.” It changed rugby. It changed sport. At the time of the Rugby World Cup Murdoch was busy overseeing the “Super League War” in Australia in which his emissaries were trying to take over the rights to broadcasting rugby league. It would be a costly, bloody war. And rugby union, in the face of such rapacious man-merchants as the sun king’s racketeers declared itself professional.
Yet so taken was Murdoch by Lomu and the World Cup of rugby union, in 1996 he tossed the incredible sum of $700 million at Sanzar – a body that was barely months old and made up of administrators who knew only amateur sport – and purchased the broadcasting rights to Super Rugby and by extent Jonah Lomu. It made the game. Lomu, in some ways, begat professional rugby. For a rugby player to be noticed by America … well. It was kind of a big deal.
Yet even before the World Cup Lomu had been noticed Stateside. America had barely heard of the game of rugby. They’d barely heard of New Zealand much less a superstar player from there. Yet he’d been courted to trial in the NFL. Fortunately for New Zealand he was convinced to stay by sevens team-mate Eric Rush, who advised him to “play one more game with the brown brothers” in a North Island versus South Island match. From there he made the All Blacks. Toured South Africa. Owned the Rugby World Cup. Changed the game.
The cowboys came again. More money but, in the cut-throat way of the NFL, no guarantees. Lomu declined. By then he was making plenty and playing for the All Blacks. He was trademarked. By 1997 there was Jonah Lomu Rugby, the first ever rugby union Playstation game
To put Lomu’s stardom in context, consider two great wingers from the previous generation: Kirwan; and Wallabies great David Campese. Both were venerated for their high-impact, all-action, exciting rugby. The pair lit up the ‘80s, an often staid period of heavy fields and rucks in muck, of lineouts that were dockyard brawls, and fat leather footballs kicked high or long or both. Yet Campese and Kirwan – fed ball by the likes of Mark Ella, John Gallagher and “Smokin’” Joe Stanley – actually ran the ball, and did so at speed and unusual tangents.
Campese’s play was exciting (and oft-maligned in Australia where there’s distrust of such frippery). His patented “goose-step” and swerve at speed, his vision and great thumping torpedo punts – and his preternatural play in the 1991 Rugby World Cup – these things kept the Wallabies and Australian rugby union on the front and back pages. Campese for a period was Australian rugby.
Kirwan’s effect was a little different, given the primacy of rugby in New Zealand. A thunder man and hard runner, he had great agility and could beat men with a fend or a bump or a step, or just burning them with speed. He once scored a try against Italy in which took a pass from a kick-off and effectively ran through all of Italy.
Yet Kirwan and Campese, they had nothing on Jonah. Nobody has, before or since, in either code of rugby. Men like Eric Grothe, Jarryd Hayne, Manu Vatuvei, Israel Folau, Greg Inglis, Julian Savea, Sonny Bill Williams, Ben Tune, and the super-fine pinball Ben Robinson have all had their moments, have all thundered about and laid waste to defenders. But Jonah was the first, Jonah shocked the world. Jonah Lomu: the first genuine global rugby superstar.
