Jonah Lomu: Rampaging wing who broke down walls to modern game

The All Black took the 1995 World Cup by storm and revolutionised his sport the way Don Bradman and Tiger Woods transformed theirs

Lomu evades the England captain Will Carling to score the first of his four tries in the 1995 World Cup semi-final at Newlands, Cape Town (AP)

Jonah Lomu was something more than a wing. Even those who talked of him, in the whispered tones of the genuinely awestruck, as an unusually big wing – or as a remarkably big and frighteningly fast wing; or as a big, fast wing blessed with the balance of a gymnast and the gear-shift potency of the souped-up Lamborghini he loved to drive– were selling a tall man short. Lomu was a pivotal figure in modern rugby, a player whose exploits at the 1995 World Cup made him the centrepiece of a three-stage revolution that changed the union code forever.

It would have been enough had he simply transformed the way people in the game viewed the No 11 shirt and those who might be equipped to wear it. Is it possible to fully understand Julian Savea, the Lomuesque wide man who helped New Zealand to the world title less than three weeks ago, without tracing him back to his All Black forerunner – the man who made this style of rugby possible in the first place?

Jonah forced the mood-makers and opinion-formers to reconsider everything they thought they knew about union, as surely as Don Bradman and Tiger Woods challenged their respective sports to reappraise and readjust.

Yet this does not even begin to do justice to the measure of the man and the upheaval he caused. The bewilderingly brilliant stuff played by the New Zealanders at the World Cup just past was the culmination of a project set in train two decades previously: at the ’95 tournament in which Lomu, just turned 20, ran over the whole of England on semi-final day in Cape Town – once, twice, pretty much as often as he wanted – and became the biggest name in international sport as a consequence. The All Blacks who had beaten the British and Irish Lions a couple of years beforehand had possessed a big, powerful wing in John Kirwan, but there had been nothing radical about their rugby back then. With Jonah instead of John, the walls came tumbling down.

There were others involved, of course: Glen Osborne and Jeff Wilson, Walter Little and Andrew Mehrtens, Zinzan Brooke and the wide-roaming hunter-gatherer Josh Kronfeld. But as Laurie Mains, the coach of that astonishing side, recalled: “Jonah was something the world just hadn’t seen. The way he could play was a major influence on the way we decided the All Blacks could play.”

That says as much about Mains as it does about Lomu. “No other international team would have had the imagination or the bravery to put a man of Lomu’s dimensions on the wing,” commented the former England coach Brian Ashton. “Over here, we’d have stuck him in the second row.”

And then there was the third element in the Lomu Effect: the impact he had on the broadcasting community, and one broadcaster in particular. No one ever accused Rupert Murdoch of being a rugby nut, still less an aficionado of the game in New Zealand – he is, after all, an Australian. But he knew a box-office opportunity in human form when he saw one and Lomu’s performances in South Africa that year, just as the sport was preparing to shed its amateur skin, led him to tell his lieutenants: “I want that man on my television screens. Go get him for me.”

Soon enough, the game had professionalised itself and Murdoch owned the southern hemisphere version of it lock, stock and both smoking barrels.

To flip the rules of wing play and open it up to a whole new range of possibilities; to set the best team in the world on the road to self-discovery; to give one of the most powerful and ambitious businessmen of the age a reason to throw money at a sport in which he had no significant interest...all things considered, the boy from Auckland done good.

Not that Lomu emerged from any old part of Auckland. He grew up in the worst corner of it: the southern district where, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the gang violence was so unremitting, even the most troubled American cities could barely keep pace.

Having spent the most tranquil part of an otherwise tempestuous childhood with close family in Tonga, he found himself in very different circumstances on his return. One of his uncles was “decapitated and chopped up in a shopping centre”, he told this newspaper back in 2002, and he subsequently lost a cousin to a stabbing attack. “That was when my mother said, ‘Pack your bags, boy: you’re off to boarding school’.”

The school in question was Wesley College, a Methodist establishment in Pukekohe, and it was the making of him. Like another great All Black of the time, the flanker Michael Jones, the youngster initially found it a wrench to play rugby on the Sabbath. Unlike Jones, he finally decided he could turn out for his team and still make peace with his maker. How the England team of 1995 wished he had reached a different conclusion. The semi-final in which Lomu made his name was staged on a Sunday.

Jones found a humorous way of squaring the two sides of himself, the religious life and the sporting life: asked how he reconciled the ferocity of his tackling with his gentleness in every other field, he replied: “The Lord tells us it is better to give than to receive.” Lomu, who committed to the Mormon church three years ago and considered himself every bit as devout in his own way, was too much of an innocent to produce one-liners of such quality. And anyway, whatever laughter there was in his world had to be balanced against the reality of the kidney disease that forced him into premature retirement.

He was already suffering from nephrotic syndrome, a condition he attempted to combat through dialysis and transplant surgery, when he blazed that trail through the 1995 World Cup.

Even though the illness was much more acute at the next tournament four years later, he still managed to tower over England like a silver-ferned goliath, scoring a try that doubled as a minor miracle in front of a disbelieving full house at Twickenham. On reflection, there may never have been a braver performance in the whole history of rugby.

All he wanted, he said last year, was to live to the age of 55, so he could celebrate the 21st birthdays of his two children. It is the saddest thing that this simple pleasure was denied him, but the pleasure he gave to others – yes, even those opponents he trampled into the dirt – will live long in the memory.

From the archive: Tony Underwood’s view

“Jonah Lomu is just about unstoppable. I should know – I tried hard enough, but getting to grips with the best winger in the world is a tough task and one that I wasn’t particularly successful at yesterday.

“The theory is first to deny him as much ball as possible. After that you fall back on being pinpoint with your tackling and spot on with your timing. I got it right once, but that was it. You can also try double-teaming, but committing two players to one tackle leaves you exposed. Either way, Lomu wins.

“Before the match, it wasn’t so much being scared of Lomu as anxious about what he could do. The first minutes showed what a 19st sprinter can do and he doesn’t have to be in full flow to be dangerous. He’s amazingly quick from a standing start for a big man and he is by far the best winger I’ve ever played against.

“Lomu wasn’t the only impressive thing about the All Blacks. Josh Kronfeld also stood out in an outstanding team. They played with a pace and dynamism we have never faced before. English domestic rugby will have to develop on the same lines as New Zealand’s if we are going to compete.”

Tony Underwood, writing in The Independent, 19 June 1995