Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (30 page)

Mandela then went around the room, shaking hands and sharing a few words with each player. As he walked out the door, François Pienaar called out, “Sir, I like the jersey you are wearing.”

Mandela realized that his visit might raise the Springboks’ blood pressure past its already dangerous level. But, he said later, his remarks “were calculated to encourage them.”

His calculations were, once again, on the money. Stransky, who as fly half would arguably endure the most stress that day, confirmed that “he got the mood just right. It was so inspirational. I would have thought it was completely impossible to ‘up’ the feelings amongst us before the game, but Madiba did. He ‘upped’ us even further.”

Louis Luyt, who had accompanied Mandela into the dressing room, agreed. “He charged them up with those words saying the whole country was behind them. It was a short speech but, my God, that was going to get these guys to play like hell!”

Three minutes later, as the chants of “Nelson! Nelson!” still washed around the stadium, it was the players’ turn to take the stage. Now it was up to them. Responsibility for the well-being of the country passed into the players’ hands. Nothing else would matter for the next hour and a half. If South Africa lost, there would still be things to salvage. There was honor in having made it to the final. The nation had come together like never before. “One Team, One Country” had ceased to be a slick marketing man’s slogan. But if South Africa lost, the whole thing would end up as a limp anticlimax, as a bittersweet memory best forgotten. The great “Nelson! Nelson!” moment would live on, but without the joyous, Beethoven’s Ninth, trumpet-blast associations that victory would evoke.

To seal the day, to make it eternal, the Springboks had to beat the odds and win. Which meant they had to stop Jonah Lomu. They got their first live view of him when they emerged from their dressing room into the players’ tunnel in preparation for the two teams’ side-by-side march onto the field. The All Blacks had a formidable team, packed with famous rugby names. But all eyes were on Lomu, as most of the Springboks’ thoughts had been ever since they had seen the giant sprinter reduce the pride of England a week earlier to a rabble of bereft urchins.

“He was
so
big,” Stransky said. “It was impossible not to admire him. I couldn’t take my eyes off him in the tunnel. He looked like a mountain. One that we had to climb!”

A mountain that, to be more specific, James Small had to climb. “I remember seeing Jonah and thinking ‘Oh, fuck!’ ” Small said, with characteristic concision. The whole team was aware of the weight on the “Englishman,” Lomu’s designated marker, who they noticed had been more than usually silent on the bus to the stadium. “It was almost the only thing on my mind. I knew that if he got a two- or three-yard start he’d be gone. But the rest of the players were really behind me, making a point of showing their willingness to back me up once Jonah got the ball.” Chester Williams, whose earlier differences with Small were submerged in the solidarity of the moment, was the first to step forward to reassure him: “All you’ve got to do is hold him up and we’ll come. Don’t worry. I’ll be there covering your back.”

Over the previous week, the South African press had seen the emergence of a new kind of rugby expert, the Lomulogist. Everyone had their theories on how to stop him. One of them was the straightforward approach Chester Williams proposed. If Small just managed to hold him up for a second, shake him off his stride, the rest of the team would pile in on top of him. Others suggested that Lomu was not as strong in mind as he was in body. Perhaps he had something about him of Sonny Liston, the fearsome heavyweight champion whom Muhammad Ali defeated not by punishing his body, but by playing tricks with his mind, jangling his brittle self-esteem. Two days before the match the South African press had quoted amply the words of a former Australian rugby captain who said that the key to neutralizing the Lomu threat was to “to try and wreck his confidence early in the match.” The idea was that Lomu became unstoppable if he believed he was unstoppable. If he lost that belief, he would crumble. The Australian said it would be helpful, for example, for Stransky to kick some high, difficult balls in his direction, pressuring him to fumble them, or, best of all, to tackle him hard to the ground once or twice in the first ten minutes. Right from the word go, the Springboks’ objective had to be “confuse the big fella,” “provide him with a mental setback or two.”

There is evidence that Mandela tried to give Lomu a mental setback or two himself. As Linga Moonsamy later revealed, before going into the Springbok dressing room, Mandela visited the All Black one. “Jonah Lomu close up was huge,” Moonsamy recalled. “But you could also see immediately that he was timid. Sort of daunted by Mandela. The New Zealand guys all had their shirts off and when Mandela stood next to Lomu, I heard Mandela say ‘Wow!’ ” He shook hands with all the players and he wished them luck. Mandela had never been less sincere, and the All Blacks knew it. “There was one detail the New Zealanders could not avoid registering,” said Moonsamy, chuckling. “He was wearing the green Springbok jersey! I really did wonder afterward if going in to see them had been his way of sending them a deliberately ambiguous message.”

Fifteen minutes later, Mandela was out on the field, going down the line of New Zealand players, shaking hands with each. When he got to Lomu, Mandela greeted the man he had barely just met like a long-lost friend. “Ah, hello Jonah! How are you?” Mandela beamed. According to a TV journalist close by, “Lomu looked like he was going to shit himself !”

The last piece of pageantry before the game began was the All Blacks’ traditional Haka. The team had been performing this ritual before the start of international matches for more than a hundred years. It was a Maori war dance designed to instill terror in enemy ranks. The fifteen All Blacks would stand in the middle of the playing field in broad formation, each man spreading his legs wide apart in a half crouch. At a cry from the captain, the dance would begin. Amid much snarling and sticking out of tongues, great stomping, thigh-slapping, chest-puffing, and menacing gesticulation generally, the All Blacks uttered a chant that sounded far more alarming in the bellowed Maori original than it does on a page in English translation: The rousing finale went:

Tēnei te tangata pāhuruhuru
Nāna nei i tiki mai whakawhiti te rā
Ā
upane, ka upane
Ā
upane, ka upane
Whiti te rā, hī!

This the hairy man that stands here
Who brought the sun and caused it to shine
A step upward, another step upward
A step upward, another step upward! The sun shines!

Fortunately for the All Blacks, their rivals do not usually have the translation ready at hand. What rivals tend at do is try to stare them down, or smirk with seeming contempt, or feign indifference. None of which are ever entirely convincing, so hypnotically menacing is the spectacle. On this occasion, though, there was a slight, but significant, break with protocol. Halfway through the performance, which lasts about a minute and twenty seconds, Jonah Lomu broke with the pattern of the dance and started advancing slowly but pointedly, eyes staring, toward James Small. But then something happened that few people in the stadium or watching on TV saw, but every player on the field registered. Kobus Wiese, standing next to Small, broke protocol himself and took two or three steps in Lomu’s direction, cutting diagonally in front of Small. “Kobus broke the line as if to say to Lomu, ‘To get to him, you have to get through me first,’ ” was how Pienaar remembered it. They were small gestures from two big men, infantile ones in the broader scheme of the day’s events, but they had their impact. Even before the referee’s whistle signaled the start of the game, it was Springboks 1, Lomu 0.

If the focus of Springbok fans was on James Small, the greater pressure was on Stransky. Because of the nature of the position he played, the kicking job, spotlight would be more on him than on any other individual player. François Pienaar and Kobus Wiese could, to a degree, hide within the grunting hurly-burly of the forward scrum. If they made a mistake, few outside the team or the sphere of expert pundits would necessarily notice. The bad news was that, by the same token, they rarely received the credit they deserved. What Stransky did or did not do, on the other hand, absolutely nobody missed. His position at fly half was the most visible in the team. But he was also the player in charge of taking the kicks, and it was often on whether a kick went over and through the goalposts—with the two points or, more often, three points that went with it—that the outcome of a game turned. If the kick sailed true, you were a hero. If it did not, you ran the risk of eternal ignominy or, in the best of cases, endless self-recrimination, like a soccer player who misses a penalty. And, like a soccer player in such circumstances, so much turned on so little. The difference between glory and disaster lay in a subtle change in the direction of the wind, in almost microscopic movements of the muscles, tendons, and nerves in the ankle, the knee, the hip, the toe.

Rugby can be a spectacular game to watch, even for people not familiar with its intricacies. It combines the tactics, power, and speed of American football with the flow, expansiveness, collective effort, and individual ball talent of soccer. To play the game at the highest level you have to combine the strength required in the one with the fitness required in the other. When the game is played well, with pace and skill, the spectacle is both crunchingly gladiatorial and pleasing to the eye. If the game is a close contest, even better, for then art and theater combine.

The 1995 Rugby World Cup final produced more theater than art. It was a grinding game. It was attrition. It was trench warfare, not pretty to watch. But in terms of sheer drama, it couldn’t be beat.

The whole of South Africa was hooked; the whole gamut of races, religions, tribes, were glued to their TV sets. From Kobie Coetsee, who found a crowded bar near his Cape Town home to watch the game; to Constand Viljoen, who saw it with friends, also in Cape Town; to Archbishop Tutu, who saw it at the Blarney Stone pub in San Francisco, draped in the South African flag; to Niël Barnard who watched it at his home in Pretoria with his wife and three children; to Justice Bekebeke with his old friends and comrades in Paballelo; to Judge Basson, the man who sentenced them to death, who was watching the game at his home in Kimberley. All of them were, at last, on the same team. As was Eddie von Maltitz, watching with his old Boer kommandos down on the farm, in the Orange Free State. He was now as committed to the cause of the Springboks and Nelson Mandela as he had been once to Eugene Terreblanche’s AWB.

“We were praying that day, man,” he said. “We were so tense. Praying, praying. If we could beat that New Zealand team, we as a nation could do so much. We were so, so united, and now there was a chance we could be even more united. It was so important for South Africa to win.”

So important that the streets were deserted, as only the pilot Laurie Kay and his crew members could testify. He landed the plane before the game had begun but there was no ground staff at the airport to greet them. Unless they resorted to an extreme measure like deploying the emergency slide, they were trapped. Finally, their driver came along, found some stairs, and rolled them up to the plane. “There was no one at all on the streets. It was like something from that post-apocalyptic novel
On the Beach.
I made it home in ten minutes flat.” Which meant he must have been going faster on the road than he had in the air over Ellis Park.

But the game itself was a more sluggish affair. It never flowed, partly because South Africa simply did not let Jonah Lomu do his stuff. James Small need not have worried; the whole team took charge of Lomu. If the first tackle did not bring him down, the second, or third, or fourth would. There were moments in the game when Lomu looked like a buffalo under attack from a pride of lions. Before the gang tackle had been perfected there were a couple of acts of individual valor. The very first time Lomu received the ball, one of the lightest South African players, the scrum half Joost van der Westhuizen, brought him crashing down with a low tackle just below the knees. (“
That
set the tone for the game,” Pienaar said.) A little later, when it seemed Lomu might have found the space and time to build up a head of steam, he was brought down with similar aplomb by Japie Mulder, the center three quarter paired with Hennie le Roux. As the big man was getting up, Mulder—a pygmy next to him—pushed his face into the Ellis Park turf.

“It was rather ungraceful of Japie to have done that,” said Morné du Plessis, without a hint of disapproval. “But it was a message he was conveying to Lomu and to the All Blacks. No one’s going to get through us today.”

And no one did. The All Blacks had got drunk on try-scoring during the tournament—but they managed not one against the Springboks. John Robbie, the former rugby-playing radio host, summed it up well. “The Springboks closed the game down, fought for every inch of ground and tackled like hell. Against this team, that was the only way they stood any chance of winning.”

The problem was that the South Africans did not score any tries either. The All Black line held as firm as the Springbok one. It really was the sporting equivalent of the First World War—no breakthroughs, lines doggedly held, shells lobbed from one side to the other. It was a game decided by kicks. Penalty kicks and dropkicks, worth three points apiece, accounted for all the day’s scoring.

By halftime Joel Stransky had bisected the posts with his boot three times, while Andrew Mehrtens, the All Blacks’ fly half, had done so twice. The score when they stopped at the end of the first forty minutes for the statutory ten-minute break was 9-6 to South Africa. But Mehrtens equalized in the second half and regular play ended, in a mood of excruciating tension, in which everything could have gone one way or the other at any moment, with the scores level at 9-9. For the first time in a Rugby World Cup, the game had to go into overtime, two halves of ten minutes each. No player on the field had ever crossed this threshold. Physically and mentally they were exhausted. But the fans were suffering more, Mandela not least, even if—in common with most of the fresh black converts around the country—he missed some of the finer points of the action. “He did not know that much about the game, but enough to follow it,” recalled gruff Louis Luyt, sitting next to him. “He would ask me questions, ‘That penalty kick, what was it for?’ But, boy, was he tense! Tense as hell! On a knife edge!”