The unforgettable day of goodwill
ONE evening in June 2006 journalist John Carlin found himself sitting opposite actor Morgan Freeman in a friend’s living room in Mississippi in the US.
Turning to the film star, he said, by no means in jest: “Mr Freeman, I have a film for you.”
In fact, all it was just then was an idea, he wrote in October 2007 – but, in the 16 months following that Mississippi encounter, he got round to writing “a book about all this”.
It was, of course, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation, the book about South Africa’s 1995 World Cup triumph on which the moving film,
Invictus, starring Morgan Freeman, was based.
For Carlin, who covered South Africa’s transition to democracy for The Independent in London, the event was always much more than a rugby game.
As he remembered telling Freeman on that distant June evening in Mississippi: “It’s about an event that distils the essence of Nelson Mandela’s genius and the essence of the South African miracle.”
The Rugby World Cup final, against the mighty New Zealand All Blacks, on June 24, 1995, he wrote, “was the orgiastic conclusion of the most unlikely exercise in political seduction ever undertaken”.
The “Amabokoboko”, as the Springboks came to be called at that time, were the instrument Mandela sought to use to get white South Africa on side, and to convince black South Africa to join him in seeing the team as a national squad that represented national pride and – potentially – achievement.
The dramatic conclusion of the match itself was sharpened by the certain truth, as Carlin wrote in 2007, that, in the eyes of “every sane rugby pundit alive, the Springboks didn’t stand a chance”.
But they were wrong. “With Mandela playing as an invisible 16th man, Joel Stransky, the one Jewish player in the Springbok team, kicked the winning drop goal in extra time.”
The national reaction was uproarious. “We didn’t have 60 000 South Africans supporting us today,” beamed victorious captain Francois Pienaar, “we had 43 million South Africans.”
His words were drowned out as Ellis Park, representing all South Africa, united in the nation’s greatest sporting moment, a 15-12 extratime triumph that was secured, with only seven minutes remaining, via Stransky’s drop goal.
Stransky bagged the winner and scored all the points as well.
The Springboks had gone into the match as underdogs against the menacing men in black, a huge question mark hanging over their ability to contain New Zealand’s huge express train Jonah Lomu.
The giant wing had his chances, but never made any real headway. The Springboks snuffed out the threat he posed by tackling him often, and with venom.
Amid unbearable tension, the two teams battled head to head through 80 minutes of high-voltage play to force a Rugby World Cup final into extra time for the first time in the tournament’s history.
Mandela was dressed in an identical No 6 jersey to Pienaar’s and waved his Springbok cap to a cheering, capacity Ellis Park crowd that chanted “Nelson, Nelson, Nelson”.
In an unforgettable moment, he handed over the gold Webb Ellis trophy to Pienaar and then, beaming from ear to ear and pumping his fists in the air, conducted the deafening chorus.
A decade ago, Carlin acknowledged that the goodwill had not endured, recognising that the “intensity of Utopian unity would have been impossible to sustain anywhere, much less in a country with a history”.
No one could know whether “things will improve, or over time go the way of Zimbabwe”, but there was no doubt Mandela’s magnanimity in 1995 was in-erasable.
Few, back then, would have imagined how the idealism of those days would be tried in the decades to come. Equally, few watching the start of that portentous Ellis Park match would have risked predicting the victory it delivered.