Niall Edworthy - Jonah Lomu: A Giant Among Men

When it was announced on 18 November 2015 that Jonah Lomu had died suddenly, it triggered a wave of mourning not just in rugby and New Zealand, but across the world and across sport even in countries where barely anyone plays rugby and among people with no direct connection to Lomu or interest in the game in which he excelled. The tributes flowed in from a remarkable range of public figures and ordinary citizens. For a man who barely completed a full season on the pitch owing to debilitating illness, he was the object of an extraordinary outpouring of grief.

There is no argument that Lomu was an outstanding rugby player, but there was clearly more to the response than grief that a once great sportsman was no longer with us. It wasnt as if he had been taken away at the peak of his playing days he hadnt done anything remarkable on a rugby field for almost 15 years. It was really only in the few weeks of two World Cups, that he truly and consistently raised himself above the rest head, shoulders and waist above, as it happens. In the bite-size tributes that burst from social media like a confetti bomb following his death, most found room in the limited space available to acknowledge Lomus character as well as his sporting prowess. It wasnt so much Lomu the sportsman they were going to miss, it was Lomu the man, Lomu the shy, humble, vulnerable, generous giant who never thought he was better than the next man except perhaps when he was barrelling towards him with an oval ball tucked under his arm.

Had you run into Jonah Lomu when he was a young tearaway on the streets of South Auckland and told him that one day he would be honoured by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, be stopped for an autograph on the streets of Kuala Lumpur and have a live televised memorial in his honour at Eden Park, he would have laughed in your face. But he would have laughed very gently in all likelihood unless you happened to have made him angry somehow. He was certainly stewing back then.

Lomus turbulent childhood cast a long shadow over his short, remarkable life. Few men have undergone such highs and lows in an existence cruelly abbreviated to 40 years by the ravages of a degenerative kidney condition. Throughout it all, the experience he endured as a youngster stalked him at every step. They are called the formative years for good reason and the more extreme the experience, the more extreme the response in the emerging character. Jonah Lomu, lugging physical and emotional burdens from an early age, both suffered and revelled in a life of wild extremes.

By the time he was 15 years old, Lomu was no longer living at home. The beatings and abuse that he, his brother and mother suffered at the hands of his heavy-drinking father had become intolerable. One day, the quiet young boy picked up his father Semisi, threw him across the room, packed up what few belongings he owned and walked out through the front door, never to return. It was over twenty years before he spoke to his father again and only then under duress. The family rupture was all the more painful for the shy teenager because he loved his mother Hepi, and two brothers and two sisters. But to get away from his father he had to leave them too.

It is difficult to measure the effect of such anguish. All we can be reasonably certain of is that Jonah Lomu was a very angry young man and when he took to a playing field, it showed. There was an urgency rocket-fuelling his will to succeed. He was born with all the physical attributes of an outstanding athlete but, without the fire within, the gifts might have counted for little. He had a furious determination to prove himself, to smash opponents, to leave them groping in his slipstream, to bellow the haka until his eyes almost popped, to train shackled by serious ill-health until his lungs screamed and his legs buckled. When the final whistle had blown on his career, and his body wanted him dead, the same furious determination drove him to squeeze the last pip of joy from his life. One of his vital organs may have finally given up on him, condemning him to spend half his days flat on his back hooked up to a machine, but he never gave up.

It is reasonable to wonder whether Lomu would ever have become the admirable man and exceptional sportsman that he was without his anger-driven resolve to succeed. Might his famous weakness for junk food, which he was happy to consume by the mountain, have proved to be temptation beyond his resistance and left him a fat, petty criminal in the suburbs of Auckland? His delinquent teenage years on the streets had drawn him into a world of violence and theft that very nearly claimed him for life. And would there have been such a boom of interest in rugby had Lomu not been there to inspire millions around the world?

Certainly Lomu believed it was a close run thing. He often talked to friends about the fork in the road, admitting that at any point in his difficult youth he may well have taken the wrong turning. In his later years, he acknowledged that it was the bitterness he felt towards his father that kept propelling him on. In a way, the fury was the making of him. When I was playing, when I found it hard, I just thought of my father and that got me through it that anger got me through.

In all the accounts and testimonies made during his life as well as after, Lomu comes across asa gentle, kind and thoughtful character. Amongst his many great friends, his countless professional acquaintances and an infinite number of autograph-hunting fans, it would be hard to find one with a bad word to say about the man. His generosity and mellowness inspired deep affection. We are given an indelible picture of a man for whom anger didnt come naturally; instead it was a characteristic tattooed onto his personality by the needles of painful experience. That anger may well have burst out of him in a way that would have been deeply damaging to him and those around him. The fact that it was diverted towards a positive end forging the volatile youngster into one of the greatest sportsmen the world has ever known was down to one school, two father figures and a sport, convulsed by revolution, that took him to its heart as its champion and flag-bearer.

In Tongan culture, the task of bringing up a child is a communal effort and a typical family unit will often include cousins and adopted children as well as siblings and grandparents. So it shouldnt have been unusual that Aunt Ruby, a devout Methodist, chose the name of the young boy born to Semisi and Hepi Lomu in Greenlane, a suburb of Auckland, on 12 May 1975. He was to be known as Jonah Jonah Tali Lomu. What was unusual was that Aunt Ruby came from his mothers side of the family when it is customary for the paternal side to choose the name. Jonah never got to the bottom of that.

When he was one, Jonah was taken from New Zealand to Tonga to live with another maternal aunt, Longo, and her husband Moses. For the next five years he lived in the village of Holopeka in Haapai, a picturesque archipelago of 62 mostly uninhabited islands made up of lagoons, coral shoals, reefs and active volcanoes. Jonahs memories of this period were dim but happy. He spent many joy-filled days swimming in the surf, playing in the sand and listening to the tales and legends of the Tongan people.

His aunt and uncle were kind people. To him, they were Mum and Dad and it was a terrible wrench to be separated from them. The return to New Zealand, shortly before his seventh birthday, was unsettling in other ways too. When he began primary school in Onehunga, Jonah couldnt speak a word of English. Until finally settling in an unexceptional clapboard house in Maitland Place, Mangere, another suburb in South Auckland, the family moved home several times, adding to his sense of disorientation. He transferred to Favona Primary School in Mangere where he found stability and support but, by his own admission, Jonah became something of a problem child and he attributed a major part of his difficulties to his father, a problem drinker. Semisi Lomu often became violent when he drank, and he dished out many beatings to Jonah and his brother John. When his mother went to her sons protection, he would often hit her too and that enraged Jonah. When sober, Lomu Senior was a good man, a mechanic, and always a grafter. His father eventually found religion and in so doing, he rescued himself and the rest of the family from the booze. It would be a very long time before Lomu could forgive him but in spite of the rift, when Lomu came into money, he always provided for his family financially. The bonds of a Tongan family are tough to sever altogether.