Mandela embraced power of sport for resistance, unity
HIS last public appearance came at the final of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Wearing a coat, gloves and a fur hat, Nelson Mandela seemed frail and dressed against something more penetrating than the evening chill.
Still, he waved from a golf cart and stirred a stadium built like a calabash to symbolise a melting pot of cultures.
Acutely, Mandela understood the power of sport to provide dignity and hope in the face of state-sponsored oppression, to undermine discrimination with resistance and to heal and help unite a society that the racial segregation of apartheid had divided brutally.
“Sport has the power to change the world,” Mandela was often quoted as saying. “It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair.”
A boxer, Mandela belonged to a generation that adhered to the amateur ideal of sport, believing it possessed an intrinsic value and offered lessons in fair play, gracious victory and edifying defeat, said Charles Korr, an Amer- ican historian and a co-author of More Than Just a Game, a book about soccer and apartheid.
It was not a naïve view, Korr said, but one that was savvy and pragmatic and rebutted the notion that sports and politics should not mix.
Robben Island was where Mandela reinforced his support for the international sports boycott against SA, under which the country was banned from the Olympics from 1964 to 1992.
In a sports-obsessed nation, Korr said, Mandela deeply understood the cultural significance of rugby, cricket, tennis and golf to the white minority and how international isolation damaged the apartheid regime’s sense of national identity.
Mandela became a huge fan of the activism of Muhammad Ali. A photograph of the American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their gloved fists in protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics was also smuggled on to Robben Island, further validating for Mandela and other prisoners the value of dissent in sports in bringing social change.
“He definitely believed that sports and politics are entwined,” said Richard Lapchick, who was a leading anti-apartheid activist in the United States.
“You could smuggle in trade, oil and currency, but if you had a sporting event you couldn’t play in the dark,” Lapchick said.
“He realised this is a sportsmad world, and it was the way that people in various countries
I wanted to make sure our people know how much I appreciated the sacrifices made by our athletes during the many years of the boycott. I have no doubt I became president today sooner than I would have had they not made those sacrifices
learned what apartheid was really about.”
On May 10 1994 Mandela became South Africa’s first black president after three centuries of white domination. After his inauguration he attended a soccer match at Ellis Park Stadium in Johannesburg to see South Africa defeat Zambia. It was time to re-enter international sport, Mandela told the crowd.
Lapchick, who sat in the pres- idential box, said he asked Mandela why he had chosen to watch soccer instead of attending inauguration parties.
He said that Mandela replied: “I wanted to make sure our people know how much I appreciated the sacrifices made by our athletes during the many years of the boycott. I have no doubt I became president today sooner than I would have had they not made those sacrifices.”
A year later, at the final of the 1995 Rugby World Cup held in the same stadium, Mandela made a widely heralded gesture of reconciliation and nation-building that would have once been unthinkable. Full democracy had replaced apartheid, and although South Africa had but one black rugby player on its roster, the Springboks played the World Cup under the slogan “One Team, One Country.”
As the tournament opened in Cape Town, not far from where Mandela had been imprisoned, he told the players: “Our loyalties have completely changed. We have adopted these young men as our own boys.”
A month later South Africa defeated New Zealand in the final in Johannesburg.
Mandela ignored the counsel of many advisers and handed the trophy to the Springboks’ white captain, Francois Pienaar, while wearing a green jersey bearing Pienaar’s number, 6.
Mandela’s gesture would be commemorated in the movie Invictus.
It was sometimes said by prisoners on Robben Island that the thing they missed most was the voices of children.
Once on a flight from Johannesburg to London, golfer Ernie Els recalled, Mandela showed great interest and delight in his young daughter.
When he won tournaments, said Els, a two-time winner of both the United States Open and the British Open, Mandela often phoned his congratulations before retreating from public view.
“He always felt proud of what the athletes out of South Africa did for the country,” Els said. “Very proud.”
Under Mandela’s guidance sport became a confirmation of possibility. It was his authority that landed the soccer World Cup in 2010.
The world’s most widely viewed sporting event came to South Africa for a month, and as Mandela took his final public wave, satisfaction was surely mixed with farewell. — © The New York Times