Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (31 page)

Mandela did not hesitate to corroborate Luyt’s impression of how he was feeling. “You don’t know what I went through that day! You don’t know!” he said, speaking for all of his compatriots. “I’d never seen a rugby match where there was no try scored. All penalties, or dropkicks. I had never seen a thing like this. But when they decided, now, to give us ten more minutes, I felt like fainting. Honestly, I have never been so tense.”

Morné du Plessis, himself a veteran of a hundred rugby battles, felt like fainting too as he imagined himself in the players’ shoes. “This was far more than a rugby game, remember, and they all knew it—it was like sending a group of soldiers who have just been through the trauma of the battlefield, and then sending them immediately back in again, straight to the front line.”

Pienaar, the twenty-eight-year-old general, reminded his teammates of their higher purpose in the interval before play resumed. “Look around you,” he told his weary troops. “See those flags? Play for those people. This is one chance. We have to do this for South Africa. Let’s be world champions.”

But his eloquence did not stop the All Blacks from going ahead with a Mehrtens kick just one minute into the restart. New Zealand was 12-9 ahead, but as the tenth minute approached, just as the halftime whistle was about to blow, Stransky popped another penalty kick high and straight between the posts. It was 12-12. The whistle blew for halftime, and five minutes later, the leaden-legged players resumed battle, for one last time. The ten final minutes of the game.

“A few days before the final, Kitch Christie [the team coach] had said to me, ‘Don’t forget about drop goals,’” Joel Stransky recalled. “And that made me practice drop goals for the couple of days leading up to the big game. Lucky I did.

“I can only remember three of the five kicks I kicked that day. The last kick was one of them. Seven minutes to go, the score still at 12-12. We had a scrum twenty-five yards out from their line. François called for a back-row move. One that we had practiced over and over.”

That meant the forwards trying to make a rush through the dense All Black lines for a try. “But Joel canceled my call,” said Pienaar. “He said he wanted the ball immediately.” So that was what they did. As Wiese recalled, “Joel needed a specific kind of scrum, we had to wheel in a particular direction, to do his drop-goal. We were very tired, but we tried it and it worked.”

The ball emerged from the human thicket of the scrum and Joost van der Westhuizen, the scrum half, the link between the forwards and the running backs, whipped the ball to Stransky. He had had thirty seconds between making his call and receiving the ball to ponder the terrifying knowledge that this could be the biggest moment of his life, and of lots of other people’s lives. The mental pressure, the towering responsibility, in combination with the physical difficulty of dropping the ball and catching it cleanly with the foot the instant it touches the ground in such a way as to make it sail high and straight, in the full understanding that two or three extremely large men are racing toward you, with murder in their minds . . . Stransky had volunteered for some of the most hazardous duty possible in any sport.

“I received the ball, clean and true, and I kicked that ball so, so sweetly,” said Stransky, reliving his life’s sweetest moment. “It was holding its line. It was spinning truly and it didn’t veer at all. And I didn’t even watch to see if it would go over. I knew, as it went off my boot, that it was too sweet to miss. And I felt absolute jubilation.”

As did every South African watching: Justice Bekebeke, Constand Viljoen, Arnold Stofile, Niël Barnard, Walter Sisulu, Kobie Coetsee, Tokyo Sexwale, Eddie von Maltitz, Nelson Mandela—the lot. But there were still six minutes to go. And Lomu was still there. And so were the other fourteen All Blacks, in the words of the London
Daily Telegraph
“the most astonishingly talented” rugby side anybody could remember.

The word from Pienaar to his men was to hold on, to hold on and to do everything necessary to try to keep the ball in the New Zealand half, pin them down, not give them the slightest glimpse of daylight.

“When Joel Stransky had that drop kick there was a British chap near me who said, ‘I’m sure that’s the decider,’ ” Mandela said. “But I could not allow myself to quite believe it. And the tension, oh, the tension! I tell you, it was the longest six minutes of my life! I kept looking down at my watch, all the time, and thinking, ‘When is this final whistle being blown, man?’ ”

The six minutes passed, the Springboks held the line, and the whistle blew. François Pienaar exploded out of a scrum and leapt high with his hands in the air. Suddenly he went down on one knee and put his face in his fist, and the other players got down on their knees around him. For a moment they prayed, then they got up and they jumped in the air and they hugged, which was what everyone else in the stadium was doing, including Nelson Mandela, who was not usually the hugging type.

“He was on top of the world,” said Moonsamy. “I was with Nelson Mandela for five years, the whole of his presidency, and I never saw him happier. He was so thrilled, so ecstatic. When the final whistle blew the whole suite erupted. If people think we bodyguards are robots, well, they should have seen us when the final whistle went. We too were hugging, and some of us were crying.”

Mandela laughed so hard as he recaptured the moment that he could barely get his words out. “When the whistle blew, Luyt,” he said, “Louis Luyt and I . . . we just suddenly find ourselves . . . embracing! Yes, embracing!” Luyt confirmed it. “When the final whistle went and the players dropped to their knees, we hugged. And he said, ‘We got it, man! We got it!’ We hugged so hard—he probably didn’t mention this part—that I lifted him off his feet!”

Up in the stands, 62,000 jubilant fans once again took up the cry: “Nel-son! Nel-son!” The thrill of victory made their chant louder, more visceral than before. Down on the field, engulfed in the crowd’s ecstasy and his teammates’ and his own, Kobus Wiese was gulping down the enormity of the moment. “I was so aware of the fact that only a chosen few will ever have this feeling and be part of this. And I cried tears of joy. I think we all cried. You just suck up the emotion of those moments after victory and you don’t talk. You just hug each other and nobody has to say anything. We realized there on that field, emotional as we all were, that we were part of history now.”

“It was impossible to say anything that could express what we felt. We all just jumped and jumped, and smiled and smiled,” said Joel Stransky, smiling. “I smiled for a whole week. I’ve never stopped smiling.”

CHAPTER XIX

LOVE THINE ENEMY

“When the game ended,” Morné du Plessis said, “I turned and started running towards the tunnel and there was Edward Griffiths, who had invented the ‘One Team, One Country’ slogan, and he said to me, ‘Things are never going to be the same again.’ And I agreed instantly, because I knew right there that the best was behind, that life could offer nothing better. I said to him ‘We’ve seen it all today.’ ”

But Du Plessis was wrong. There was more. There was Mandela going down onto the pitch, with his jersey on, with his cap on his head to hand over the cup to his friend François. And there was the crowd again—“Nelson! Nelson! Nelson!”—enraptured, as Mandela appeared at the touchline, smiling from ear to ear, waving to the crowd, as he prepared to walk toward a little podium that had been placed on the field where he would hand the World Cup trophy to François Pienaar.

Van Zyl Slabbert, the liberal Afrikaner surrounded in the stadium—as he put it—by beer-bellied AWB types, was amazed at the new South African passion of his born-again compatriots. “You should have seen the faces of these Boers all around me. I remember looking at one of them and there were tears rolling down his face and he kept saying, in Afrikaans, ‘ That’s my president . . . That’s my president . . .’ ”

And they applauded with still more tears when Pienaar offered what would be the first of two memorable moments of impromptu eloquence. A reporter from SABC television approached him on the field and asked, “What did it feel like to have 62,000 fans supporting you here in the stadium?”

Without missing a beat, he replied, “We didn’t have 62,000 fans behind us. We had 43 million South Africans.”

Linga Moonsamy, walking onto the field one step behind Mandela, looked up at the crowd, at the old enemy screaming his leader’s name, and he battled to remember that he was working today, that while all those around him were losing their heads, he had to keep his. But he preserved enough professional sangfroid to remember that before the game began he had seen in the right-hand corner of the stadium those old South African flags. So he shot a glance toward that area again. “But no,” he said, “those flags were gone now. There were only new South African flags. And the people in that sector of the crowd were crying and hugging, like everybody else. So I let go a little and allowed myself to think how huge this moment was for the country, how I myself had done what I had done when I was younger, had taken risks, had fought for this, never imagining it would express itself on such a scale.”

Tokyo Sexwale, who was there in the stadium, shared Moonsamy’s sentiments. “You sit there and you know that it was worthwhile. All the years in the underground, in the trenches, self-denial, away from home, prison, it was worth it. This was all we wanted to see. And then again, ‘Nelson! Nelson! Nelson!’ We stood there, and we didn’t know what to say. I was proud to be standing next to this man with whom I had spent time in prison. Look how high he is now! And you are just proud, so proud, to have supped with the gods . . .”

The gods at that moment were Mandela and Pienaar, the old man in green, crowned king of all South Africa, handing the cup to Pienaar, the young man in green, anointed that day as the spiritual head of born-again Afrikanerdom.

As the captain held the cup, Mandela put his left hand on his right shoulder, fixed him with a fond gaze, shook his right hand and said, “François, thank you very much for what you have done for our country.”

Pienaar, meeting Mandela’s eyes, replied, “No, Mr. President. Thank
you
for what you have done for our country.”

Had he been preparing for this moment all his life, he could not have struck a truer chord. As Desmond Tutu said, “That response was made in heaven. We human beings do our best, but those words at that moment, well . . . you couldn’t have scripted it.”

Maybe a Hollywood scriptwriter would have had them giving each other a hug. It was an impulse Pienaar confessed later that he only barely restrained. Instead the two just looked at each other and laughed. Morné du Plessis, standing close by, looked at Mandela and the Afrikaner prodigal together, he saw Pienaar raise the cup high above his shoulders as Mandela, laughing, pumped his fists in the air, and he struggled to believe what his eyes were seeing. “I’ve never seen such complete joy,” Du Plessis said. “He is looking at François and just, sort of, keeps laughing . . . and Francois is looking at Mandela and . . . the bond between them!”

It was all too much for the tough-minded Slabbert, hard-nosed veteran of a thousand political battles. “When François Pienaar said that into the microphone, with Mandela there listening, laughing and waving to the crowd and raising his cap to them, well,” said Slabbert, “
everybody
was weeping. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.”

There wasn’t a dry eye in the country. The groot krokodil’s old minister of justice and prisons, down in his crowded bar in Cape Town, was sobbing like a child. Kobie Coetsee could not stop thinking back to his first meeting with Mandela ten years earlier. “It went beyond everything else that had been accomplished. It was the moment my people, his adversaries, embraced Mandela. It was a moment comparable, I felt then, to the creation of the American nation. It was Mandela’s greatest achievement. I saw him and Pienaar there and I wept. I said to myself, ‘Now it was worth it. All the pain, anything that I have experienced, it was worth it. This endorses the miracle.’ That’s how I felt.”

Far away in dusty Paballelo, Justice Bekebeke felt the same. Five years earlier he had been sitting on Death Row, sent there by one of Coetsee’s judges, but that suddenly seemed very remote now. “I was in heaven!” he said.

“When Joel Stransky scored the drop goal the rest of the guys were celebrating and shouting their heads off and so was this Doubting Thomas. I felt 100 percent South African, more South African than I ever had done before. I was as euphoric as everyone else in the room. We were all going absolutely nuts. And after the final whistle blew, after Mandela handed Pienaar the cup, we were running in the streets. So was everybody else in Paballelo. Horns were blaring and the whole township was out dancing, singing, celebrating.”

These were the same streets where Bekebeke had killed the policeman who had opened fire on a child; where the riot cops had gone berserk the night before the death sentences were passed on the Upington 14, clubbing everyone in sight, sending twenty people to the hospital.

“It was unreal. And to imagine that these scenes were being repeated all over black South Africa only five years since Nelson Mandela’s release, two since Chris Hani’s assassination. To have imagined then that I’d be celebrating a victory of the Springboks would have been the most unlikely thing in the world. Yet, looking back, I cannot believe my indifference on that morning of the final, that I did not care. Because there was only one way to describe my feelings now: extreme euphoria.”

In Paballelo, in Soweto, in Sharpeville, and a thousand other townships, groups of youths were charging up and down the treeless streets performing their own Haka, the old war dance, the Toi Toi. But they weren’t defiant now; they were seized by multicolored national pride, celebrating the victory of the AmaBokoBoko.

Reports washed in from the affluent suburbs of Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Johannesburg that white matrons were shedding generations of prejudice and restraint and hugging their black housekeepers, dancing with them on the leafy streets of prim neighborhoods like Houghton. For the first time, the parallel apartheid worlds had merged, the two halves had been made whole, but nowhere more manifestly so than in Johannesburg itself, and especially around Ellis Park, where the Rio carnival met the liberation of Paris in a riot of Springbok green. One old black man stood in the middle of the road outside the stadium waving a South African flag, shouting over and over again, “South Africa is now free. The Boks have made us free, and proud.”