Invictus - Carlin [105]
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,