When Jonah Lomu first ran at us in secondary schools rugby - with the ball tucked under one giant arm - he would laugh in the face of head-on tacklers. Not a gentle chuckle, either. Nor a derisive snort. These were bellyaching guffaws. He sincerely found it hilarious that merehumans - normal-sized ones at that - would try to tackle him.
And, boy, he was having fun.
I was a lousy player at that level of the game and every other one I played in, but some of the other blokes in the Waiuku College 1st XV were good footy players. A few went on to representative honours. No matter to Jonah. He was fair and even-handed in his skittling of defenders: good players, bad players - we were all flicked aside like beads of sweat from a shaken forehead.
That first year, he was a lock in Wesley College’s 2nd XV and was, by Jonah standards, a shade on the skinny side. But people were already talking about him. Before he became world rugby’s first global star - back when the flattening of Mike Catt was a mere twinkling in his eye - everyone involved in Counties secondary schools rugby knew Jonah was something different. Especially those of us unfortunate enough to find ourselves standing in front of him on a Saturday morning.
We faced him again in the years that followed, when he would start matches for Wesley’s 1st XV at No 8, before moving to first five-eighths or centre, depending on his mood, and ducking in to jump at No 2 in the lineouts. I’m pretty sure he put the ball into a scrum one time.
By the third year I played against him, Jonah wasn’t laughing any more. His game face was on - and there was another 20-odd kilograms of muscle packed on to his frame and 20-or-so metres gained with every run. He had become the brutal force that world rugby was soon to discover. But I’ll never forget that laugh.
