Invictus - Carlin [109]
“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