Invictus - Carlin [107]
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