The moment of piercing truth at Jonah Lomu's farewell

Jonah Lomu might have been the most famous rugby player in the world, but he was also one of the loneliest.

So said teammate and, more importantly, great mate, Eric Rush as he farewelled the legend yesterday. It was a moment of piercing truth on a day where the man, the father and All Black star was farewelled among thousands of people - at the ground and in front of their TVs - he probably didn't realise cared so much.

Jonah's last visit to the old park came way, way too soon. The giant of the game, metaphorically and physically, was brought back to Eden Park and if you tried hard enough, you could imagine a wry smile on his face as he returned to the ground where he first underwent a rugby trial by ordeal at the hands of the French.

As a neophyte wing in 1994, Jonah was turned this way and that by the likes Emile Ntamack and Jean-Luc Sardourny. The rush to condemnation was typical of the impossibly high standards we set our All Blacks - quick and brutal.

Jonah wasn't equipped for test rugby; he turned as quickly as the Queen Mary; he wasn't fit enough. No matter that Jonah was already defying the laws of physics with his sheer pace and size, he wasn't smart enough to adapt and adjust to the game at the highest level his critics noted.

It's intriguing to think about the havoc that crude analysis might have played on the psyche of a 19-year-old who had enough trouble navigating through a tough childhood on the low-decile side of the tracks as he did among the best players in the world.

Rush provided the answer. It hurt. But in highlighting Jonah's vulnerability he also revealed a greater truth: Jonah was smart, he was resilient and boy was he tough. Not in the swaggering way of the street, an easy and all-too-convenient South Auckland cliché, but between his ears, where it counts most.

Jonah overcame a lot to become rugby's first global superstar and not just the ill health that would curtail his career.

Chris Grinter, his deputy principal and 1st XV coach at Wesley College talked about Jonah coming to Wesley with a troublesome reputation that had nothing to do with sport. He talked about the outlet sport provided for Jonah to reach his immense potential.
First it was athletics, where Jonah was talked about as a potential decathlon star, then rugby, which in those formative years ranked a distant second behind league in Jonah's affections.

It was at Wesley that Rush first crossed paths with the manchild who would go on to revolutionise the game.

They were playing touch, Rush tried to beat him on the outside, Jonah jogged alongside him smiling.

Rush would become the buffer between a young Jonah and archetypal Southern Man Laurie Mains, his first All Black coach. What he found it harder to protect him against was the real world, the way instant fame swallowed Jonah up and wouldn't let go.

How, ironically, the instant recognition led to a lonely existence.

Life on the field was probably a lot simpler to deal with, which might be why Jonah refused to give up when the health gods so were overwhelmingly stacked against him.

Lomu's post-kidney transplant comeback was hopeless, in the true sense of the word, and utterly endearing. There was one mud-stained Saturday, July 15, 2006, on the back fields of North Harbour Stadium, when he turned out for Massey against North Harbour Marist.

Jonah played for half an hour, his first game on New Zealand soil for three years.

There were a couple of thousand spectators there that day for a game that would normally attract a couple of hundred on a good day. Even at 31, out of condition and playing with one borrowed kidney and another that didn't do its job properly, Jonah had pulling power.

Standing opposite him that day was 20-year-old Nick Blincoe, who after the game had the good sense to call him the "most influential winger, most influential player" the world had ever seen.

But Jonah has left us now. He leaves us on a first-name basis, like Sir Ed.

Just like the man who scaled the world's highest peak and put New Zealand on the map, we'll miss him.

It might not become apparent how much until 2019, when the ninth World Cup kicks off in Japan and we realise the bloke who launched professional rugby, who popularised the sport and World Cup in a way few thought possible, is no longer there to grace it.

Jonah Tali Lomu, 1975-2015...there will always be something so horribly unfair about those numbers.