Invictus - Carlin [113]
Arrie Rossouw, the Afrikaner journalist who met Mandela in Soweto on the day after his release, echoed that point, but with even more feeling because he, as a white South African, had felt himself a loser, a pariah, in the judgment of the world. “We were no longer the baddies anymore,” Rossouw said. “Not only did we win, the world actually wanted us to win. Do you realize what that meant to us? What joy? What enormous relief ?”
Tokyo Sexwale said that Mandela had liberated white people from fear. That was true, but it went deeper than that. He set them free in a larger sense. He redeemed them, in their own eyes and the eyes of the world.
And then he made them world champions. Kobus Wiese, François Pienaar, Hennie le Roux, Chester Williams, James Small: they all agreed, the Mandela factor had been decisive. They had won the game for him, and through him. “The players knew that the country had a face and a name,” as Le Roux put it. “We were playing for South Africa but we were also playing not to let the old man down, which came to the same thing.”
“It all came perfectly together: our willingness to be the nation’s team and his desire to make the team the national team,” said Morné du Plessis. “It came at just the right moment. And I am convinced it was the reason we won the World Cup.”
Even Louis Luyt agreed. “We could not have won it without Mandela! When I went down with him to see the players in the dressing room before the game—I saw it, he lifted them a hundred percent up! They won it for him as much as anything.”
Morné du Plessis felt it was going to be South Africa’s day the moment he saw Mandela on the edge of the field in the Springbok jersey receiving the crowd’s acclaim. “I say this with no disrespect to a truly memorable All Black team, but the enormity of the man we had behind us, and the power that emanated from him and through him, struck me as a little unfair.” Sean Fitzpatrick, the formidable All Black captain, admitted much later that Du Plessis had a point, that he did experience a certain awe on hearing the crowd’s response to Mandela. “We heard them shouting his name,” said Fitzpatrick, “and we thought, ‘How are we going to beat these buggers?’ ”
Too late, Fitzpatrick understood that his team might have Jonah Lomu, but the others were playing with a one-man advantage; they had a secret weapon against which the best rugby team in history had no answer. Joel Stransky could have taken credit for the triumph, but handed it instead to the Springboks’ sixteenth man. “The impact he had on the players was immeasurable. That day was a fairy tale come true, with Mandela at the heart of it. He won it for us.”
And that day, he reveled in it. The ride home from the stadium took three times longer than expected, but, as Moonsamy said, it could have taken six times longer and Mandela would have asked for more. “All our best-laid plans went out the window. Our route was absolutely clogged. The whole city was transformed into a giant street party. But Madiba was loving every minute of it.”
Moonsamy remained alert, but the notion that someone might now wish to assassinate Mandela seemed outlandish even to him. When the four-car convoy finally made it back to Houghton, a small crowd was standing outside his home celebrating. When Mandela got out of his Mercedes to greet them, an elderly lady came up to him. Moonsamy stood aghast as she made a little speech to Mandela declaring that until that afternoon she had been an AWB