Jonah Lomu's impact on rugby in the Rugby World Cup semi-final demolition of a confident England team at Newlands in Cape Town in 1995 drew initial comparison as 'rugby union's Michael Jordan moment'.
Former British & Irish Lion and England five-eighths Stuart Barnes wrote in the 60-year anniversary issue of Rugby World said Lomu's four tries had taken him to a global face overnight.
"No one has climbed the dizzy heights to the stars like the late, great New Zealand giant," Barnes said.
He said Jonny Wilkinson, the England five-eighths offered up as 'a 21st-century alternative' [really?] but Lomu was the name that was still on the lips of rugby fans.
"In an era of marketing evolution, ever-growing televised rugby and more pages in print and online, Lomu remains unchallenged.
"I believe the primary reason is linked to rugby's deluded belief that it really is a global game. We the rugby fans with roots in Anglo-Saxon empire, are an echo chamber.
"Lomu's name is shouted loudest in New Zealand. It echoes back from rugby-loving Wales, where Jonah played for Cardiff in his days of dwindling power.
"In the rugby world, he changed the game and he has been deified for his incredible feats on the field," he said.
But Barnes resiled from his earlier comment about the Jordan comparison made in the immediate wake of that game in 1995.
"I was intrinsically wrong to write of any Jordan effect. The mass-marketing of American consumerism and the soft power of their global cultural hegemony made Jordan a name Lomu could never be, not coming from little old New Zealand," Barnes said.
He made the point that the United States was obsessed with basketball while the Jordan brand, through Air Jordan shoes, had eclipsed the man while football had Lionel Messi and Ronaldo who were all-powerful.
Rugby was a few sizes smaller and it needed to accept that fact.
"Maybe then we can focus not on simplifying the sport and spreading it thin. Playing less but playing better. Less needs to be more.
"With the exception of New Zealand, the sport has become an attrition. Defences dominate. In Lomu's day, there was more space (when South Africa closed it down he could not score) and he exploited it. Now the claustrophobia would make it harder for Lomu to rampage as he did in 1995 and for most of his career.
"The same Jonah would not be as frightening in 2020 as he was in the last decade of the last century," he said.
Barnes did acknowledge that in the general sporting world where the power of the English media created the greatest waves, Wilkinson was seen as the 21st century's rugby star [although not listed as a player of the magazine's decades] when the best player may well have been Dan Carter.
"The one is a seamless link with the game's fly-half traditions, the other something new and bruisingly brutal," he said.
There were exceptional players about but none, Barnes said, had been 'so obviously staggeringly exceptional as Lomu'.