O n Monday this week I spent an hour with Jonah Lomu. What a complete pleasure it was to see him again. I hadn’t realised until then that he was so into Barry White.
Or Julio Iglesias, come to that. Seeing Lomu, shoulders dancing to Barry from the pimped-up stereo he’d had installed in the back of his car, was a real highlight. A beautiful, warm, hilarious moment.
It was nine years ago that Lomu died, aged 40, of a heart attack. That we get to meet him again is a stroke of luck that has become a new documentary film, Lomu: The Lost Tapes. The slice of fortune that got us here is down to Mark Souster, formerly rugby correspondent of The Times.
In the early Noughties, Souster spent a few weeks in Auckland shooting another film with Lomu. Then, three years ago, when Souster was packing up to move house, he came across a bag of old Betacam cassettes. They contained ten hours’ worth of unused footage.
It was a goldmine..
