Dark days but not All Black

Interview/Jonah Lomu: Keith Duggan meets the man who became an instant legend during the 1995 rugby World Cup and now waits for a life-changing kidney transplant

Through his feats, through those ebony-tinted exhibitions of muscle and grace on the rugby fields of New Zealand and across the world, Jonah Lomu's physical mass became as mythical as the fish that got away. They spoke of him in shock and awe. With every story, he grew stronger, faster, bigger.

"A freak" was the popular description during his global debut at the emotional 1995 World Cup in South Africa. It was during that optimistic summer of Mandela that the 20-year-old man-child with pretty, Polynesian features and a Herculean physique became rugby union's most potent symbol. In the unforgettable first minute of New Zealand's World Cup semi-final against England, when he trampled over the white shirts of the Empire as if they were papier mâché men, he looked, in that splendid and fearsome All Black uniform, like a god. He looked as if he had been created for that moment.

And nearly a decade later, the stories of Lomu's decline provoked a similar sense of wonder. Nature's gift to sport, its most stunning contribution of physical splendour, was vulnerable after all. With each season since that glory burst nearly 10 years ago, the rumours worsened. Jonah had a mystery illness. He might never play again. He might never walk again. He spent most of his days attached to a medical machine. Jonah was over. Last September, when he was filmed shuffling in a suit across a stage to pick up an honorary award in Sydney before the World Cup final, people were taken aback.

It was as heart-wrenching as the greying Ali throwing mock punches with an infirm arm. Except that with Jonah it was worse because he was still recognisable as the young man who tore through rugby with the power of a wrecking ball and the cleanness of a ballet dancer. He still was that young man, but stripped of the powers in which we all celebrated.

So it was unsettling waiting for Lomu to walk through the door of a meeting room in an opulent London hotel last Wednesday. Sport and television and Lomu's own unique force of nature allowed him to loom in our imaginations as a kind of archetype from another age: the benign warrior, the protector. In every sense, he seemed larger than life. And the thought of encountering that magnificence in a reduced state and in ordinary surroundings was disconcerting.

When he strolls in with his wife, Fiona, he is of course completely and nothing like you would expect. The size of the man is striking and impressive but in a grey T-shirt and jeans instead of the black colours of New Zealand and smiling instead of wearing his warlike game face, he is far from intimidating. And while the kidney ailment that has stopped his rugby career still affects his daily life, the numbness in his feet has gone away and he possesses the panther's stride of all true athletes.

"That whole time was quite interesting," he recalls, sitting down.

"The things you took for granted - like waking up in the morning and walking to the fridge to grab a drink - were suddenly taken away. I still kept trying but it got so annoying. Because I'd manage to stand and then I would be rocking and rolling and then take a couple of steps and fall over. Bang! Up again and then bang! But we got on top of it and it's starting to come around.

"So if I do have a transplant hopefully it will repair everything else. It comes with its own complications and stuff but it is better than being hooked up to a machine for eight hours, that's for sure."

At 28, Lomu is comparatively ancient by international sports standards to be releasing an autobiography: many sports celebrities consider it bad manners to release fewer than one every winter. Lomu has been the subject of much writing but this is the first time he has told his own fantastic story.

Right now, his rugby life is in limbo as he tries to rectify the rare kidney condition, nephrotic syndrome, which has troubled him all his adult life. As he tours promoting his book, friends back home are undergoing tests to see if their kidneys are compatible with his: there is a queue of people willing to donate an organ.

"Guys from back at home, guys from childhood and later life. Real close friends, and I am fortunate to have them. My family weren't suitable in terms of certain tests we carried out. But I have one friend who is at the last stage now and, hopefully, when I get home I should find out if we are a perfect match. The signs are pretty good at this stage. And then we have to find out where we can get the operation done."

Lomu cannot swear he will wear an All Blacks jersey again but to do so is among his abiding wishes. He keeps in touch with former and current All Blacks by phone and believes most of them will be surprised by the story he is currently telling.

"Cos I was kind of private about that stuff and anyway, in a squad situation, you talk about rugby or music or you just have fun. So it was easy for it not to come up."

In his eponymous biography, Jonah Lomu says the ultra-violent and bleak New Zealand film Once Were Warriors struck such a chord with his own adolescent situation that it made him choke up in the cinema. It is at once a heartbreaking and sickening evocation of the machismo and boredom and frustration that transformed the Polynesian citadels of south Auckland into strongholds of alcoholism, domestic abuse and nihilistic violence.

"The weird thing is that they filmed it near where an aunt of mine lived. Like, the pub that is featured quite a bit is right near my aunt's house so there are all these recognisable features. So it kind of hammered the message home."

Lomu's background was not impoverished in the way, say, Maradona's was and he had a strong extended-family network with a devout Christian ethic. But that foundation was splashed with the blood that coursed through south Auckland in the late 1980s. His uncle David Fuko was hacked to death by a gang bearing machetes in a shopping complex, apparently the victim of mistaken identity. Lomu ran with a gang called the City Crip Boys and caused mayhem: casual muggings, petty theft, aimless boozing, savage street brawling between Samoans and Tongans. He was stabbed twice and on first-name terms with the city police squads.

Rugby, he reckons, probably saved his life. In 1988, his mother managed to get him enrolled in Wesley College, a bastion of New Zealand Methodist education and a rugby mecca. It was there he fell under the tutelage of Chris Grinter, the first of the key authority figures to come into his life.

"I guess it's quite interesting to wonder what I would be without rugby - especially when I compare it to a lot of my friends that are behind bars or dead. More than my uncle ended up getting hacked up with a machete. That's what I grew up with.

"These guys would kill you with their bare hands. There was a lot of bad blood that spilled over. Like I was at school playing footie when a close friend and relative got stabbed. And the worst thing about it was that he lived one street away from me and the guy who killed him lived across the road. We all knew each other. And it was over absolutely nothing."

Against that urban nightmare, Lomu carried formative memories of childhood bliss in Tonga, where he lived with his aunt Longa. Island life was simple, carefree and drenched in sunshine and superstition. When his parents came to take him back to New Zealand, he did not want to go and he reckoned the anger he felt at suddenly being placed in this foreign environment where nobody spoke Tongan remained with him through most of his adolescence. Even as a young adult, he fought to control it.

In his early years at Wesley, he would chase people around the pitch if they took a shot at him. In later life, he learned that the best response was to just smile it off and reply by charging back, ball in hand.

Although he became - and remains - very close to his mother, his relationship was never less than volatile with his father, who got nasty when drunk and was frequently drunk. At 15, he stood up to his old man and was thrown out. He never came back. Nearly 15 years on, a deeply uneasy relationship still exists. Even after Lomu became the sensation of world rugby, his father never gave a word of praise.

"Nah," shrugs Lomu. "Like, he will turn up at things but he is not the 'congratulations' sort of guy. And I guess the book has opened up a whole new can of worms between me and my father. I would say I love my father because he is my father. But it is easier to forgive than forget and some of those things you don't forget. I don't hold a grudge. But the only characteristic we share is that we are both stubborn. If I make a decision I stick to it but I do have some leeway when it comes to dealing with other people. With him there is no leeway. He doesn't. And that is where we buck horns."

Lomu speaks in a soft and understated way so that whether he is talking of his music collection - he reckons he has catalogued some 30,000 tunes over the years - to the more outrageous events in his life he never sounds melodramatic. The most bizarre anecdote in the book dates back to his early childhood when he walked into his aunt's house in Auckland to find her suspended, well, upside down and in mid-air. Later it was explained a spirit had possessed her.

"I know it sounds crazy but that is what happened. The first thing I looked for was ropes because I presumed she had been tied or something. But she was just in mid-air. I just thought, 'far out'. And I had just come in from watching a Bruce Lee film so to go from that to this scene in the house was . . . it kind of stays with you."

And it wasn't the kind of tale he was inclined to relate to the senior All Blacks like Frank Rush and Sean Fitzpatrick when he was drafted into the national squad by the legendary Laurie Mains in 1994. Established men like Frank Bunce still saw Lomu as an introverted Islands boy rather than a south Auckland tearaway. That was fine with Jonah: he watched and learned and persevered through the World Cup training camp organised by Mains at Taupo in February of 1995. It has since become an emblem for the extreme toughness that the amateur scene produced at its zenith.

Lomu was shocked to see seasoned All Blacks throwing up during sprint sessions and others actually crawling across the line to finish. Throughout, Mains stood implacably by, stopwatch in hand.

Anyone was free to leave: several, pleading injury, did and never returned. Lomu survived and Mains unveiled him as the winger that changed the borders of imagination of rugby union. It was only after Mains's final game as coach, in France a couple of seasons later, that Lomu spoke to him about his past and it all came gushing out, fast and shameful and with tears, still in his gear and still in the dressing-room.

"I just felt I would never get the chance to speak like that again or I might never have the courage. Because I guess he kind of made me as a person."

If that is the case, then it must rank as one of Mains's finer achievements. Lomu must be believed when he claims to have beaten up innocents on the street just to fit into the gang culture, but it is hard to square with the warm-hearted public figure of today.

In his enthusiasms, Lomu has retained a boyish wonder. There is nothing of the jaded superstar in his nature. Although he has travelled the world first class, he grows animated when he describes a trip on the ferry from Fishguard. He was coming to Dublin for promotional work and fancied driving one of his beloved cars. He thought the ferry was a riot and disarmed the staff so much that they took him to the engine room and later on to the top deck.

"Aw man, and the waves were big that day, I was lifted and then, wooh, in the air. It was great. Beat the usual thing of airports, you know."

He and Fiona share a soft spot for Ireland. Because of the rich vein of destruction he wreaked upon England since 1995, it is largely forgotten that Lomu's first test of that World Cup was against Ireland. He was a novice then and, internationally speaking, just a rumour: a Goliath that New Zealand were keeping hidden.

On the eve of that game, a fax arrived in the New Zealand hotel from opposing Irish wing Richard Wallace promising to "waste" Lomu. It was, of course, a prank perpetrated by Irish fans but the senior All Blacks gleefully pored over the missive with the astonished Lomu, who was beside himself with indignation. He had heard the Irish were "mad" - but this meant they were certifiably insane.

He thundered over for two tries in that game and ran 70 metres to set up Josh Kronfeld for another that was voted the score of the tournament. He believed he was on course for his third, rattling towards the line, when Simon Geoghegan came like a bullet from the opposite wing and hurled himself in front of the runaway train.

"Oh, I can still feel the tackle," Lomu laughs. "Yeah, he's a great man. Great player. He had some speed on him. He just came at me out of nowhere."

It was strange the way it ended for the most exciting players from their respective countries that day. Geoghegan retired prematurely from rugby through arthritic feet in 1997, just when the Lomu legend was in full flow. Lomu had been awarded 63 All Black caps and scored 37 tries when his kidney condition finally got the better of him in late 2002. His last match was against Wales in Cardiff that November: he ghosted through it in abject pain and with double vision and was rushed to hospital soon afterwards.

Since then, there have been highs and lows. Lomu has something of Ali's magnetism and grace about him, an indefinable quality that makes people want to reach out and touch. Perhaps it is the smile and the complete absence of self-pity or bitterness. Letters continue to pour in and the website he and Fiona created has been inundated with fan mail from areas of the world where rugby has made no impact.

The beauty is the the story may not be over. Lomu playing for the All Blacks again may appear to be nothing more than a dream at present but if so, it is no more delusional than a kid from the wrong-end, forgotten boroughs of Auckland becoming the most recognisable and revered player in rugby history. And as he points out himself, he will only be 32 when the next rugby World Cup rolls into France in 2007. When it comes to New Zealand rugby, he says there is no role too great or small for him. He would do anything to be part if it. And when you hear him talk of what it is to perform the Haka on the days when rugby seems primal and important, you understand.

"You learn it before you become an All Black. It's in you," he says, hands moving and eyes bright.

"It is a way of psyching yourself up and you get a huge rush of blood. You can see how Maoris went to war with this. And you don't really think of anything, your head is clear and the blood is flowing. But the secret is to control it. You just recite it and the meaning is clear. You are setting down a challenge to your opponent in a noble way."

See, the man was once a warrior. And he is never going to quit on the good fight.

Jonah Lomu will be at Hughes and Hughes in the St Stephen's Green centre today at 5 p.m. to sign copies of his autobiography.