Invictus - Carlin [88]
That night the Springbok players celebrated as rugby players do, drinking until four in the morning, being feted—carried high aloft—everywhere they went. Kitch Christie, the coach, did not spare them their daily run at nine the next morning, from the heart of the city out to the seashore, but the throbbing pain of it was eased by the passersby who cheered them every step of the way.
A day later, their heads still rather the worse for wear, they found themselves on a ferry bound for Robben Island. It had been Morné du Plessis’s idea. Du Plessis had begun to see just how enormous the impact of this “One Team, One Country” business was, not only in terms of the good it would do the country, but the good it would do the team.
“There was a cause-and-effect connection between the Mandela factor and our performance in the field,” Du Plessis said. “It was cause and effect on a thousand fronts. In players overcoming the pain barrier, in a superior desire to win, in luck going your way because you make your own luck, in all kinds of tiny details that together or separately mark the difference between winning and losing. It all came perfectly together. Our willingness to be the nation’s team and Mandela’s desire to make the team the national team.”
Robben Island was still being used as a prison and all the prisoners there were either Black or Coloured. Part of the day’s event involved meeting them, but first the players took turns viewing the cell where Mandela had spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years in captivity. The players entered the cell one or two at a time; it couldn’t hold any more than that. Having just met Mandela, they knew that he was a tall man like most of them, if not as broad. It required no great mental leap to picture the challenges, physical and psychological, of being confined in a box so small for so long. Pienaar, who had done a bit of reading on Mandela’s past, also knew that it was in this cell, or at any rate in this prison, that much of the energy and planning behind the boycott of the Springbok international tours had come. Morné du Plessis had a similar reflection, all the more powerful since he had been one of the Springbok players affected by it. Steve Tshwete, now the minister of sport, had told Du Plessis that, in these cells, they listened on the radio to the Springboks’ games against the British Lions in 1980. The guards yelled at the prisoners to stop their cheering, but they cheered on. “And you know,” Du Plessis told me, “looking around those cells, seeing what we put them through, you know what? I would have cheered for the Lions too.”
After Mandela’s cell the Springbok players went outside to the yard where Mandela had once been obliged to break stones. Waiting for them was a group of prisoners.
“They were so happy to see us,” Pienaar said. “Despite being confined here they were so obviously proud of our team. I spoke to them about our sense that we were representing the whole country now, them included, and then they sang us a song. James Small—I’ll never forget this—stood in a corner, tears streaming out. James lived very close to the sword and I think he must have felt, ‘I could have been here.’ Yes, he felt his life could so easily have gone down another path. But,” Pienaar added, recalling the bruising fights he would get into when he was younger, the time he thought he had killed a man, “ . . . but mine too, eh? I could have ended up there too.”
Small remembered the episode. “The prisoners not only sang for us, they gave us a huge cheer and I . . . I just burst into tears,” he said, his eyes reddening again at the recollection.“That was where the sense really took hold in me that I belonged to the new South Africa, and where I really got a sense of the responsibility of my position as a Springbok. There I was, hearing the applause for me, and at the same time thinking about Mandela’s cell and how he spent twenty-seven years