Justin Olam makes a compelling case as the NRL’s most popular man with an entire, rugby league-mad nation behind him and his prime minister in regular contact | SMHsport
Justin Olam greets arrivals when they walk out the doors of Port Moresby airport and takes private counsel from Papua New Guinea’s prime minister.
A couple of ‘Justin Olam fan club’ Facebook pages boast more than 240,000 combined followers, trumping the tallies of entire clubs like Canberra, Manly and Cronulla among others. “I still haven’t gotten used to those billboards,” he laughs. “I still look at guys like Marcus Bai and David Mead, they’re still the guys I look up to like that.
It’s a hell of a way from Olam’s famed upbringing in rural PNG, where games between remote villages were organised with a letter sent two weeks in advance, then marched to and from by foot. “In Papua New Guinea, that’s Justin Olam. Everyone knows him and everyone looks up to him because he has taken a path to the NRL out of PNG, it’s an inspiration to the generations looking up to him.”