Invictus - Carlin [82]
Some more than others. Kobus Wiese, Balie Swart, and Hannes Strydom were naturals. Wiese and Strydom were both six foot six and 250 pounds; Swart was three inches shorter but as wide as a barn door. They were all extraordinarily fit, as they had to be to play the brutally high-voltage kind of rugby that the Boks were famous for. And they loved to sing. Wiese (pronounced “Veessuh”) was one of the team’s funny guys, a man whose sharpness of mind belied his bulk, but whom no one had ever accused of being a progressive thinker. Mandela’s release had moved Du Plessis, had inspired his teammate Joel Stransky, had shaken Pienaar, but, by Wiese’s own admission, it had left him cold. Swart was one of the quietest members of the team, but because he was older than most, as well as bigger, he demanded and inspired respect. Wiese and Swart were best friends. Not only were they both forward players almost physically bound to each other during games inside the frenzied human pileups that rugby dignifies with the names “ruck,” “maul,” or “scrum,” but they had been performing together in a choir for years.
Wiese was amazed at how quickly the music of “Nkosi Sikelele,” the very first time he had ever sung it, swept away all political scruples. “I’d heard the song before, of course,” he said. “I’d seen those television images of huge masses of black people marching and singing and dancing through the streets with sticks and burning tires; throwing stones and burning down houses. And you always had ‘Nkosi Sikelele iAfrika’ playing over the images. For me, and for just about everyone I knew, that song was synonymous with ‘swart gevaar’—the black danger. But, you know, I love singing. Always have. And suddenly I found, to my astonishment, that I was caught up in it; that this song was so lovely.”
Os du Randt, the baby of the team, aged twenty-two, but the heaviest at six foot three and 260 pounds, sang shyly, as if trying not to be seen. Known as “the Ox,” he had served in the army in a tank regiment, though it was a mystery to anyone how he would ever have managed to get into a vehicle so confined. Ruben Kruger, six foot two and weighing a measly 224 pounds, was one of the smaller players in the forward engine room but as strong as a wildebeest, having built up his muscles from an early age in a family business whose chief activity consisted of carrying vast bags of potatoes over the shoulders. Pienaar sought as always to lead by example, and joined in gamely, yet he struggled badly with the pronounciation of the words, and the song itself had registered in his mind far less—“few of us even knew the tune, to be honest”—than it had on the politically unenlightened Wiese.
Wiese, Swart, Kruger, Pienaar, Du Randt, Mark Andrews—these were some of the star players in the forward “pack.” The players who filled the fast-running “three quarters” positions seemed at first sight to belong almost to a different species. Anne Munnik was struck by the contrast. Not only were they more normal-sized, but their faces were less fearsome, their noses less misshapen, their ears not deformed by hours and hours of rubbing against thick, hairy thighs in the sweaty, heaving meat factory of the scrum. They were the Springboks’ matinee idols, rugby’s David Beckhams.
James Small, who modeled clothes when he was not playing rugby, was the bad boy among them, the one who had been banned from the previous year’s tour to Britain after a barroom brawl. But, Munnik noticed, no one sang the song with more feeling than he did. “He was close to tears the whole time,” she said. The ordinary South African rugby fan, aware of his off-field shenanigans, would have struggled to believe it, but his teammates did not. Everybody who knew him had the sense that he lived perilously close to the edge, that had it not been for the partial escape valve rugby provided