Charles Lomu

And then I was told that I wouldn't be going because my father said, I have to play the trial game for this rugby league game to try and make it into the representative club.

And so...

I didn't have a choice in that.

And that, I think, was something that really ate at me.

And... It'd feel like a betrayal or something.

Yeah, I just thought, like, this is an opportunity to say goodbye.

I will never have again.

My opportunity to say goodbye is right now.

And so I had to live with that.

But it was something that harboured a lot of resentment in me for that.

It changed the way I viewed the game.

It went from something that I actually enjoyed, really enjoyed playing, to becoming something that prevented me from having that opportunity to say goodbye to my grandfather.

So poisoned it.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I sort of viewed that from that point on, I'm no longer playing this game for me.

I'm now playing it for my father.

And I just lost that personal enjoyment for the game after that.

Yeah, at this time I started drinking a lot and I started to distance myself from people who were actually, you know, beneficial, you know, for me, the people that were actually like Robin Connor, my grandmother.

I started to distance myself because...

A lot of my cousins, I didn't feel like I could actually talk to them about this because they viewed him as a grandfather and they viewed their father as a father.