All Blacks legend Jonah Lomu dead at 40

This article was first published on April 23, 2005

Once unable even to walk properly, New Zealand rugby union star Jonah Lomu is back training again after a kidney transplant and dreaming of a return to the All Blacks team. Alex Brown reports.

Jonah Lomu lay sprawled on the living room floor, screaming at the legs that had suddenly, inexplicably, collapsed beneath him. "What the hell is going on?" he bellowed, tears streaming down his face. "Why aren't you bloody working?"

Barely six months earlier, those same legs had carried Lomu around the rugby fields of New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. Now, they were unsteady. Like taking away a musician's hearing, a winger could imagine few worse fates than being robbed of the full use of his legs.

So Lomu lay there, distraught in the arms of his wife, Fiona, all the while knowing that his unsteadiness was merely a symptom of a far more serious problem. He needed a transplant. A 10-year battle with Nephrotic syndrome had damaged his kidneys to the point that, every morning, he faced a life or death decision.

"Eight hours on dialysis. Or kick the bucket? That was no option," Lomu said. "You have two choices in life when your kidneys fail. You either do dialysis or you die. And dying is not in my vocabulary.

"The darkest moment was when I fell over for the first time. I had no clue why it happened. By the time of the 2003 World Cup, I needed my wife to help me walk. I would take three steps and fall over, or I could walk for 10 minutes and then just fall over out of the blue. It just gave out when it wanted. I was basically numb from the knees down. My walk wasn't a walk, it was more of a shuffle."

Today, Lomu isn't shuffling. He's running. And boxing. And lifting weights in preparation for his return to rugby on June 4, when his own select XV takes the field at Twickenham to play a Martin Johnson XV.

That match will complete the first stage of Lomu's comeback. Then again, it won't just be Lomu in the No. 11 jersey at Twickenham. Deep inside him, between the badge on his chest and the number on his back, part of Grant Kereama will be there, too.

Lomu quips that should he realise his ultimate dream of reclaiming the All Blacks jersey he last wore in 2002, Kereama deserves a Test cap. For without Kereama's kidney, Lomu wouldn't be standing at the precipice of international rugby's most audacious comeback. "He becomes an All Black at the same time," Lomu said. "It becomes a reality."

Certainly, Lomu looks different to the player who spent the latter part of 1995 scraping the remnants of Rory Underwood and Mike Catt from his sprigs. He's six kilograms heavier than he was at that World Cup, yet nowhere near the 152 kilograms his frame once blew out to. And his biceps seem more pronounced, the result of a gruelling training regime that has included sessions with heavyweight boxer David Tua.

Then there are the scars. Like the one on his wrist, where doctors combined a vein and an artery after months of dialysis. He will wear a special brace to guard the wrist when playing. "You can touch it," he says. "You can feel the heart, the blood running through. That's my party trick."

The second scar runs down Lomu's lower abdomen, where doctors completed the unusual procedure of inserting Kereama's kidney behind the ribcage for the express purpose of protecting it from shuddering shoulder charges on the field.

"Someone can give me a shot there and I'll be right, I won't need to wear any padding," he said. "It isn't standard to put it behind the ribs. Usually, they put it down lower in the abdomen. It's been done before, but not for the purpose that I'm doing it. The surgeon rang me and said there was a scenario he hadn't told me about where he could slip the new kidney where it will be more protected, if rugby's the way I wanted to go."

Even then, a comeback to rugby seemed like fantasy. After all, the damage sustained to Lomu's nerve endings was such that, assuming the transplant was successful, he would still need to teach himself to walk, jog and sprint again, never mind the nuances of professional rugby.

It wasn't easy. Lomu recalls stopping upwards of 22 times during his first jog, puffing and wheezing and stumbling all the while. But 22 stops soon became 10, and 10 stops soon became none. And before long, Lomu discovered that his recovery time between training sessions was unlike anything he had known before.

Since his childhood, Lomu had learnt to accept that he would feel "levelled" after every act of physical exertion. A short sprint would render him breathless for five minutes. A longer session would leave him so tired he would sleep even in the middle of the day.

Two matches after becoming the youngest Kiwi selected for a Test match, he scored a double in his World Cup debut against Ireland in 1995. By then, he was well aware of his renal problems, stripping down to a "lean" 117 kilograms and playing dehydrated just to complete matches. The 195-centimetre colossus, who seemed indestructible, was slowly dying internally.

But Lomu suffered in silence, channelling his energies into scoring the seven tries that guided the All Blacks to the final and earned him player-of-the-tournament honours. At the time, his feats were regarded as among the most astonishing witnessed in rugby. As it turned out, even more astonishing was the fact he performed those deeds with his kidneys leaking so much protein that, two years later, he would be forced from the game to receive his first major course of treatment.

"It wasn't that great, so as time went on, it was deteriorating the whole time," he said. "I had to ask my surgeon and specialist at the time if rugby was going to do any more damage to the kidney. They said it's just going to get worse. No matter what I did, I was going to end up with renal failure. I thought, 'Oh well, I might as well just play it out and see where I go'."

Lomu got to the 1999 World Cup, and played another starring role. Privately, though, he knew he was playing on borrowed time. After his last game in 2003, Lomu's creatinine levels were almost 30 times greater than those of an average person. But not today. Today, those creatinine levels are close to normal, and Lomu is revelling in the new sensation of completing a training session then backing up for another.

"The thing is, I don't know what 100 per cent feels like," he said. "At the moment, it's getting close to it. To me, that's what I want to find. I haven't quite found my limit yet. So having the energy to actually do it is for me quite scary because I'm pushing my body to where I used to break before. Now I'm pushing my body to that and beyond and I still haven't found that breaking point yet.

"It's very interesting in that sense because some of the more concentrated training I'm doing is working at becoming faster and stronger and also just making sure that I come back a more complete player. I'm working on the weaknesses I had before and what people remember me as, and strengthening up all my weaknesses so I become a more complete player."

Asked what he most looks forward to when he returns to the field, Lomu's answer is typical. "Just tackling someone," he said. "And just running into someone. That's why I get the boys to chuck heavy bags at me while I'm doing push-ups in training. One is smacking me and the other is throwing a bag at me. I told them not to hold back or they'll get the bag back twice as fast."

And if an opponent holds back in any way, mindful that Lomu is a transplant recipient? "That'll be their fault," he added. "I'm there to play the game and if he takes it easy, he's going to find out about it."

Reality suggests that Lomu will be hard-pressed to reclaim his All Blacks jersey, given that New Zealand has a glut of younger, more recently tested three-quarters, such as Joe Rokocoko, Doug Howlett, Ma'a Nonu and Ricoh Gear all performing in the Super 12.

Then again, you could argue that when he runs out onto Twickenham, barely three weeks after his 30th birthday, Lomu will have completed the most successful comeback in Test rugby. "I could live with no World Cup, but I couldn't live without giving it a go," he said. "My soul is free and I can carry on with life."

This article was first published on April 23, 2005