Jonah Tali Lomu: All Black legend who battled illness
1975-2015
JONAH Tali Lomu was born to Tongalese parents in Pukekohe, a poor area of Auckland, on May 12 1975. He was taken to Tonga by his parents when he was young to keep him out of trouble after a cousin had been stabbed in a street gang fight in Pukekohe. He later returned to attend Wesley College in Auckland, where he excelled in rugby and athletics.
A remarkable aspect of Lomu’s career is that he performed all his great feats on the rugby field while suffering from a serious kidney disease. Although this was identified as nephritic syndrome only in 1996, when he was 21, he had felt the debilitating effects long before and always had to retire to bed after a game rather than go out on the town with his colleagues. “Imagine what I could have done healthy,” he once remarked.
Lomu had a kidney transplant in 2004 but went on playing at various levels of the game until 2007. By 2011, however, the transplant was failing and for the last four years of his life he was on dialysis for six hours every other day.
Lomu married three times. In 1996, he married Tanya Rutter, a South African, with whom he lived for four years before they were divorced. He married his second wife, Fiona, in a secret ceremony on Waiheke Island in 2003. They divorced in 2008 after he had an affair with Nadene Quirk, causing tension with her then husband, a rugby player whom she had married only 10 months before. In 2012, the couple became members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints. They had two boys, Brayley and Dhyveille, now aged six and four.
Lomu’s famous tries from 1995 were replayed often this year, the 20th anniversary. “When they show clips of me on TV, my boys turn to look at me,” Lomu proudly observed.
He died suddenly from a heart attack the day after returning from a UK promotional tour.