Gregor Paul: Lomu still the most famous player on the planet

Lomu's speed and footwork on display. Photo / Getty

The All Blacks are a big deal in Europe. Jonah Lomu was bigger, so much bigger that there would be plenty over there who didn't realise Jonah wasn't the All Blacks.

That was perfectly illustrated in November 2009 when the All Blacks were in the football-crazy city of Milan. The All Blacks were well received at the iconic San Siro Stadium but when Lomu came out to wave to the crowd, there was pandemonium. No one would have minded had he just stayed out there and waved and the game never happened.

He hadn't played a test for seven years and, yet, there he was, the most famous player on the planet. That might have perplexed the Kiwis in the crowd. The All Blacks are like time, they wait for no man and there's always a new hero, a new superstar to capture the imagination.

There's also the truth about no one being a hero in their home town and spoilt for choice. Inundated with magical players, New Zealanders perhaps failed to grasp the significance of Lomu and his legacy.

The English, Scots, Irish and Welsh had no problems understanding what he did. All four of them encountered Lomu at the 1995 World Cup and felt his full force. All four nations felt like they went to bed one night, woke up the next morning and rugby was an entirely different game.

That was Jonah - he changed the landscape, truly changed it, because his impact hit on two distinct fronts.

Rugby had been edging slowly towards professionalism between 1991 and 1995. Increasing amounts of cash were being stuffed in shoe boxes and sham jobs were being created, but officialdom - mired in some forgotten world of clubs where ties have to be worn and hats left at the door - clung on to this ridiculous idea that the tide could be held back.

The players were desperate to break the shackles. They needed something or someone to create irresistible momentum to drag the sport to the future it craved.

That someone was Lomu. This shy, almost reticent young man from South Auckland with the Tongan warrior spirit running through him, was going to change the world.

He was the irresistible force - 120kg of perfectly honed flesh that had the same sort of power as a 747. There were plenty of athletes his size, none though, had ever been selected on the wing. None had ever been his size and yet equipped with his explosive pace, power and agility.

If he'd been concocted in a lab by the finest scientific brains, they wouldn't have been able to match nature's genius.

As the 1995 World Cup developed, Lomu was frequently refereed to as a "freak" by all those who encountered him. It was never meant as anything but the highest compliment. Great players such as Gavin Hastings had never seen anything like it. One day Hastings was a legend, the next he was being trampled into the dirt and, as much as it hurt, he loved that Lomu was taking the game to a new frontier.

It's possibly an apocryphal story, but supposedly media tycoon Rupert Murdoch saw Lomu's single-handed destruction of England in the semifinal and on the strength of that, was persuaded to bid for the Southern Hemisphere's broadcast rights.

That was the straw that broke the camel's back, as it were, and left the gin-swilling brigade with no choice but to accept their precious game was no longer amateur. Lomu had been enough of a spectacle to persuade media tycoons there was a global audience for rugby.

Lomu was enough of a drawcard for Murdoch to stump up close to $1bn to own the Southern Hemisphere game. And with that money flowing, a new generation of players were suddenly basking in what for them was unimaginable wealth.

His legacy didn't end there, though, and was still highly visible, if not necessarily appreciated, at the 2015 World Cup.

Major corporates were crawling all over it and, for the first time, there was a sense of there being a cult of the superstar. The big names were on billboards everywhere. TV screens had rugby players endorsing this and that and the origins of this brave new world can be traced back to the events of 1995 and the miraculous work of the man who wore the All Blacks No 11 jersey.

On the field, too, there were strong traces of Lomu - none more obvious than within the All Blacks were Julian Savea's performance against France in the quarter-finals evoked such strong comparisons.

In scoring his second try that night, Savea was frighteningly reminiscent of Lomu. The comparisons almost brought Savea to tears. Lomu had been his idol growing up. He'd followed the great man's hairstyles over the years and wanted nothing more than to one day wear that All Blacks No 11 jersey.

Had it not been for Lomu, Savea most likely would never have been put anywhere near an All Blacks No 11 jersey, or a No 11 jersey of any kind. At 110kg, what business did he have playing on the wing? But that's what Lomu did. He changed perceptions about what was possible. He opened everyone's eyes to the prospect of fielding enormous men at the widest, most vulnerable parts of the field and using a combination of pace, power and sheer size to wreak havoc.

There wasn't just Savea at the World Cup. There was Welsh wing George North, Samoa's Alesana Tuilagi and Fiji's Nemani Nadolo.

Giant wings are commonplace now but would anyone dispute that the original remains the best?

Lomu was denied, both as a player and father and husband, the longevity he deserved. But while his career was all too short, it made the most phenomenal impact.