Invictus - Carlin [80]
But much had changed in South Africa in that short time, and Luyt had changed too. Softened by Mandela the way all Afrikaners seemed to be (“He was so nice, respectful, and charming at the same time, the first time we met,” he said), Luyt had learned a new sense of political responsibility from the international rugby authorities, who did not want the World Cup to become a racially fraught global fiasco. Responding to this need, Luyt made two enlightened appointments. He named Edward Griffiths, a liberal-minded former journalist as CEO of the rugby federation, and Morné du Plessis, the former Springbok captain who had gone to see Mandela at the Cape Town Parade on the day of his release, as manager of the World Cup team. Griffiths earned praise for the deftness with which he ran the World Cup operation, but his most enduring and valuable contribution came in the form of the slogan he invented for the Springbok campaign. “One Team, One Country” not only captured the imagination of South Africans, it conveyed Mandela’s purpose to perfection.
If Griffiths was the brains behind the scenes, Morné du Plessis was the guiding spirit, his job to put theory into practice, to persuade the team to behave in such a way as to convince the country at large, but black South Africa in particular, that the slogan was not just hollow words. Being manager meant a lot of other things too. The job differed from that of the coach, Kitch Christie, who was in charge of everything that had to do with the game itself, with what happened on the field, starting with team selection. Du Plessis’s duties covered everything that happened off the field of play, something along the lines of team administrator: ensuring the travel arrangements were right, the playing equipment was in place, the bills were paid. But in this case, at this time in South African history, the job came to mean a great deal more. It was an opportunity for Du Plessis not only to forge a winning team but also to atone for what he increasingly understood to have been his failure (“one of my life’s greatest regrets,” he later confessed) to rise to the occasion when he had been Springbok captain and do or say something that might have helped improve the lot of black South Africans.
Du Plessis believed his new role to be about more than logistics. He wanted his team to strike the right national chord, get the political atmospherics right, make the players realize that they were playing not just for white South Africa but for the whole country. The one great thing he had going for him was his credibility. A giant of a man, he remained a legend among white South Africans, who never forgot his record as Springbok captain, most famously the leadership and talent he displayed in a famous victory over the old enemy, New Zealand, in 1976.
Luyt’s choice of Du Plessis impressed the ANC, for his liberal political leanings were now well-known. But it was a delicate task he had ahead of him, and he knew it. “I understood almost immediately on taking up the job how easily one could slip up, how one could ruin everything with one silly mistake, by saying the wrong thing, striking the wrong note.”
It was precisely out of his desire to strike the right note that Du Plessis came up with the idea of teaching the Springboks to sing the “black” half of the new national anthem, “Nkosi Sikelele.” He and Mandela shared the same mission impossible: persuading black South Africans to perform a historical about-face and support the Boks. Mandela was doing his bit within the ANC, sending word out to his people that now “they” were “us.” Du Plessis did his bit by urging the players to behave respectfully in public. He knew that things could go terribly wrong if before