It was a worrying journey on the road into Ellis Park in Johannesburg on a Saturday in June 1995.
But what could go wrong? We almost laughed at the statistic that 40% of people in South Africa carried guns. Bill Lothian, the doyen of our tremulous party, said: “The Irish have got bigger problems.”
The next few weeks afforded us disparate difficulties, but beautiful big bad Jonah Lomu wasn’t one of them. That Saturday evening, this marauding 20-year-old New Zealand winger almost single-handedly demolished Ireland, who flung themselves 100% into the All Blacks and even scored the first try, but were subsequently bewitched, bothered and blown away by the giant man-mountain.
We knew we were watching somebody special, and yet…..extraordinary didn’t cover it. The Irish were brushed aside, but then England were supposed to pose a greater challenge. Huh! Once Jonah cranked into gear – think Usain Bolt with a bad attitude and 100lbs extra weight along with a rugby ball – the normal rules were ripped up.
So were England. Will Carling flung himself into tackling the big New Zealander and came off looking like one of the stuntmen on “The Incredible Hulk”. Scotland’s Gavin Hastings, in his final Test, was marched over as if he was a Krankie confronting the Kraken. Lomu was invincible, or so it seemed until the final when the home-based South Africans flung themselves into the fray to lift the World Cup.
It was the right result for rugby and it transformed the whole of South Africa. But it was incredibly harsh on Lomu, who had been the undoubted star of the tournament.
And do you know what? He smiled and told me that it hadn’t been meant to be, even while buying me a Diet Coke. “I don’t know what happened on that day, but we never got to grips with the Boks,” said Lomu. “I don’t know if we just thought we would beat them in the final, but that was silly. They were better on the day.”
The following summer, I was in New Zealand as Scotland tried to lock horns with Lomulator Rex in Dunedin. On a beautiful, icy day, I stood next to Bill McLaren as the minutes passed and I can remember the late Borders commentator – who was then 70 – warming up with his usual methodical philosophy. “Say, laddie, is this Lomu going to cause us problems?” He asked me, just because I was standing closest to him. “He’s a big blighter, but I think our boys know how to handle him.”
In the event, the tourists did fantastically well and the Scots scored 30 points: the trouble was that Lomu and his compadres were racking up 48 on the other side. But it summed up Lomu later that he told me, for my book “Southern Comfort”: “We grew up with this wonderful voice in our head and it was Bill McLaren – even as a child, you knew he was in love with the game and if he asked you a question, you made sure he got a good answer.
“I could never really remember when I had done what. But Bill could always fill in the gaps. I’m not saying he knew more than our [New Zealand] coaches. But he knew as much.”
Jonah Lomu retired too soon from rugby with kidney problems which forced him into a transplant. He spent much of the last decade of his short life in surgery, which gradually, inexorably wore him down and sapped his spirits.
Yet he never lost his glint for a golden moment, such as when he turned up inside a quiz machine in Dublin this year or when he told me: “You Scots are good at rugby – you’re two inches too short, but you’re still good!”
He was an irrepressible spirit. He has gone far too soon.