Invictus - Carlin [3]
I said I meant to frame the book around the drama of a particular sporting event. Sport was a powerful mobilizer of mass emotions and shaper of political perceptions. (Another nod, short and sharp.) I gave as examples the Berlin Olympics of 1936, which Hitler used to promote the idea of Aryan superiority, though the black American athlete Jesse Owens upset those plans badly by winning four gold medals; Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play major league baseball, helping set in motion the necessary change of consciousness that would lead to big social changes in America. I mentioned also America’s unexpected ice hockey victory against the Soviet Union in the Winter Olympics of 1980, all the sweeter because it was played on home soil.
I then reminded Mandela of a phrase he had used a year or two earlier when handing over a lifetime achievement award to the Brazilian soccer star Pelé. He had said, and I read from some notes I had brought, “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, the power to unite people that little else has. . . . It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers.”
Finally coming to the point, I told Mandela what the narrative heart of my book would be, why it was that I would need his support. I told him that there had been one sporting occasion that outdid all the ones I had just mentioned, one where all the themes I had been touching on during this conversation had converged; one that had evoked magically the “symphony of brotherhood” of Martin Luther King’s dreams; one event where all Mandela had striven and suffered for during his life converged. I was referring to the final of the—
Suddenly, his smile lit up the room and, joining his huge hands in happy recognition, he finished the sentence for me: “. . . the 1995 Rugby World Cup!” My own smile confirmed his guess, and he added, “Yes. Yes. Absolutely! I understand exactly the book you have in mind,” he said, in full voice, as if he were not eighty-two but forty years younger. “John, you have my blessing. You have it wholeheartedly.”
In high spirits, we shook hands, bade each other farewell, and agreed we’d arrange another meeting soon. ln that second interview, with the tape recorder running, he explained how he had first formed an idea of the political power of sport while in prison; how he had used the 1995 Rugby World Cup as an instrument in the grand strategic purpose he set for himself during his five years as South Africa’s first democratically elected president: to reconcile blacks and whites and create the conditions for a lasting peace in a country that barely five years earlier, when he was released from prison, had contained all the conditions for civil war. He told me, often with a chuckle or two, about the trouble he had persuading his own people to back the rugby team, and he spoke with esteem and affection about François Pienaar, the big blond son of apartheid who was the captain of the South African team, the Springboks, and the team manager, another mountainous Afrikaner, Morné du Plessis, whom Mandela described, in a courtly, old-fashioned British way he has, as “an excellent chap.”
After Mandela and I spoke that day, all sorts of people agreed to talk to me for the book. I had already accumulated much of the raw material for my