A love letter to LEGACY
The pilot episode of the greatest TV show of the last 5 years ends with Logan Roy (a composite of King Lear, Rupert Murdoch and Andrew Carnegie) refusing to let go of the reigns of his sprawling media empire. Roy decides, ultimately, that none of his children are impressive enough to carry on the running of Waystar Royco, and ultimately not impressive enough to carry on his legacy. ‘It's my fucking company’ he snips at his son Kendall after throwing out a few weak excuses for changing tack so abruptly, despite widespread media speculation that he is to step down. Not many of us will reach the heights of a Logan Roy. Still, beyond financial gain, the idea of legacy is central to the reason why many of us do the things we do, even if we’re not likely to stab our children in the back; we follow sports teams, cling on to career ladders, live vicariously through our children and extend and improve houses in the vain hope that when we’re gone someone might remember us, remember that we gave ourselves over to something with permanence. In a modern world built on individualism, it becomes a harder and harder ideal to understand.
The All Blacks rugby team runs on an engine fueled by legacy. Read any account of their team structure and you’ll learn about players respecting the legacy of the jersey they have inherited, keeping a little black book of notes on how they have lived up to that legacy and acting as a caretakers for their position; the ethos relies on the notion that what you have is only yours until you pass it on. Fitting then that as I recently rummaged through an old bedroom in my parents’ house, I found the legacy of one of the greatest All Blacks to ever play still intact; a battered but unbroken version of Jonah Lomu Rugby for the original PlayStation games console. Released by Rage Software only a matter of years after the sport had turned professional, Jonah Lomu Rugby’s crystallisation of a key moment in the development of Rugby Union is almost unique. I am immediately transported back in time by the stark utilitarian nature of the game’s jewel case; like all early PlayStation titles, the black spine bears the title in white uppercase with zero ornament; the front cover takes an equally spartan approach, showing a barely-evolved version of the title and a slightly blurry crop of Jonah Lomu himself, all 6ft 4 inches and 119 kg, gilbert ball tucked to his chest under one monumental arm.
I take the disc from the case and load it into the PlayStation, which feels more like the equivalent of a kid’s play kitchen when compared to more modern consoles; the buttons are chunky, the disc toploading like a record, the controllers and external memory card attached to satisfyingly blockish ports. The game wastes little time in selling itself during loading, pausing momentarily to underline for the player that the title is solely endorsed by Jonah himself, rather than any other rugby unions or federations. There is an odd paradox at the heart of this lonely endorsement; on the one hand, players select to play matches at invented grounds such as Tallyfield and Ballydown Park and the game’s intro video, in the absence of any copyrighted rugby footage, shows a Māori man engaged in the haka war dance, set against the flag of New Zealand. In a similar fashion to Rage’s other sports titles (Pete Sampras Tennis, Brian Lara Cricket) the game is built around the totemic celebration of one player. Fittingly, an easter egg team can be unlocked consistently entirely of fifteen Jonah Lomus.
And yet it is perfectly possible to play the entire game without ever seeing its namesake take to the pitch. Indeed the most memorable aspects of the game (ones sure to make millennial men across the country misty-eyed) have nothing to do with Jonah Lomu. Primary amongst these is Bill McLaren’s quaint and grandfatherly commentary, iconically suggesting a tackle might land a player in ‘Edinburgh Royal Infirmary’ or that a kick launched high into the sky might ‘have snow on it when it comes down.’ The names of long-retired, deceased or forgotten players have lasted longer in my memory than some I have watched play in the flesh; the epically-named Thai outhalf for instance, Poj Lanksanasompong. I can find no trace of him on the internet bar one mid-shot photo on a stock imagery website, but for a few years at the turn of the millennium, his was as household a name as any other athlete in our home. Sharing the image into our family WhatsApp results immediately in a response of ‘Lank-sana-som-pong!’ no doubt recreated in Bill McLaren’s whisky-sweetened Scottish brogue.
For a man who exists in the common imagination as a physical behemoth, Lomu’s death was surprisingly premature. At the age of only 40, he suffered a heart attack due to complications from a lifelong kidney disease. Whilst much was made at the time of his various achievements and accolades, Jonah Lomu Rugby remains the perfect legacy, a game in which Lomu is captured at his peak; running 100m in just over 10 seconds and possessing an unstoppable hand-off. It is a game, however, in which he humbly shares the stage with the Poj Lanksanasompongs of the world, steam-rolling giants of the game and bit-part players equally immortalised in glorious 32-bit action.
In the words of Bill, they don’t make ‘em like that anymore.
