Halfway through Lomu: The Lost Tapes, sports journalist Tony Johnson tells a story that is unverified but feels true.
In the months following the 1995 Rugby World Cup, as the game made its abrupt, necessary shift into professionalism, “The rumour is that people in Rupert Murdoch’s empire had seen him play – and maybe even Rupert Murdoch himself – and had said ‘I want this guy’,” Johnson says.
It was the sheer spectacle of Lomu that made Murdoch reach for his chequebook, making the professional game possible.
“Even if Jonah wasn’t the greatest player,” says Johnson, “there’s no question that he had the greatest impact on the game. He was the greatest force that the game’s ever known.”
The force persists 30 years after that World Cup, 10 years after the kidney disease that curtailed Lomu’s playing career claimed his life at the age of 40 – and 20 years after the “lost tapes” in the title were made.
The tapes are rough Betamax recordings made in Auckland in the early 2000s by Mark Souster, former rugby correspondent for The Times, and apparently rediscovered by Souster three years ago in the course of moving house. The journalist showed the video to former Irish captain Brian O’Driscoll, co-founder of the TV production house 3 Rock, and they agreed it had the basis of a documentary.
Any revelation hinted at in the title isn’t really there – not in the tapes, anyway. From a reported 10 hours’ worth of recordings, we see only clips from a scene of Lomu in Cornwall Park, showing off his cars, chatting to kids and signing autographs; and from an extended interview in which he quietly reflects on his life.
It’s a post-rugby Lomu who may be more familiar to us than to viewers in the Northern Hemisphere, for whom the film is really made. What is less familiar is the voice of Fiona Taylor, his wife and manager at the time the recordings were made, who has largely stayed out of her former husband’s public story. She’s a thoughtful commentator on how Lomu’s life was shaped and what it came to mean, although we perhaps get more of a sense of intimacy from his friend and former Sevens teammate Eric Rush, who witnessed the advance of Lomu’s kidney disease even as his star ascended.
“I knew he wasn’t right,” Rush recalls, “because I saw all the pills he used to take in the morning. He’d be oh, no, no, [it’s] water retention. He’d make up stuff. It wasn’t until later on that we really found out how crook he was.”
Sean Fitzpatrick does a serviceable job of narrating, Frank Bunce and former All Blacks doctor John Mayhew provide context and England veterans Will Carling and Tony Underwood are lined up to ruefully recollect being run over by the giant Lomu in 1995.
“I was willing to do anything – I was basically in another zone,” says Lomu himself of the semi-final. “I could run into a brick wall that day.”
But some key elements of the story are missing. Phil Kingsley Jones, who made his name as Lomu’s first manager, is never mentioned. From 1996, the year after that World Cup sensation, we see him score a try for the Blues in the inaugural Super 12 final, but you’d never know the Wallabies existed. His third wife and the mother of his children, Nadene – who last year failed in a legal bid to block a different Lomu documentary – goes unseen.
Even given the need to fit a lot into 50 minutes of TV, the result feels patchy. But perhaps evidence of the giant’s gentleness is reason enough itself for the film to exist.
“His gentleness was born out of not wanting to be his father,” says Taylor at the conclusion. “Not wanting to be a violent man.”
Lomu: The Lost Tapes, Three, Sunday, February 2, 9.25pm and ThreeNow.
