Invictus - Carlin [92]
As the team drove back and forth between their hotel and the training camps, the roads would be lined with crowds of people, more and more of them black as the days passed. James Small remembered that “we looked at each other and thought, Fuck! President Mandela wasn’t kidding: maybe the whole country really was with us.”
Hennie le Roux echoed the point Mandela had made about victory mobilizing the Doubting Thomases. “We could see the country really was uniting around us but it was through winning that we would make that bond stronger. The better we did on the pitch, the wider the ripple effect off it.”
The adversity and high drama before and during the game against France also helped. There was a distinct chance that the game might be called off and a victory would be awarded to France. The balmy Indian Ocean city of Durban had experienced one of its periodic semitropical downpours and the King’s Park field was waterlogged. If the game was not played that day, World Cup rules decreed that France would be declared the winner, owing to South Africa having had a poorer disciplinary record in the tournament so far. (One player had been sidelined for rough play in a fiercely fought game against Canada.) The whole country paid anxious attention as rugby officials and even the armed forces launched a desperate race to get the field fit for play on time. Military helicopters were recruited to fan the field from above, but the day was saved by a battalion of black ladies with mops and buckets whose heroic labors persuaded the referee to let the game proceed.
Despite the cleaning ladies’ efforts, the game itself was a mudbath with a slippery oval ball somewhere in the middle over which large, filthy men violently scrapped. With two minutes to go and South Africa holding on by 19 points to 15, a vast, Kobus Wiese-sized Frenchman of Moroccan extraction called Abdelatif Benazzi thought he had wrested the ball over the line for what would have been the winning try. But instead the referee awarded the French a scrum—the eight biggest from each side in armadillo formation against each other—five yards from the South African line. If the exhausted “Bleus” pushed the exhausted Springboks back over the line, that would be that. France in the final. Show over for the Rainbow Nation. The Springboks were about to go down and take their position in the melee when Kobus Wiese, all six foot six of him in the second-row engine room of the scrum, uttered a battle cry that stirred his team mates. Addressing himself to his best friend Balie Swart, the prop forward in the front row, he said, “Listen, Balie, in this scrum, you are not coming back. You can go forward, you can go up, you can go down or you can go under. But you’re not coming back!”
The Springboks did not go back and South Africa were through to the final. “That game was a battle of wills, more than anything else,” Morné du Plessis said. “It was the game in which we really felt that Mandela magic having an impact on us on the field of play. Because we had found out, you see, about Mandela’s speech the day before there in KwaZulu. We had heard that at a place where people were dying he had given a speech in which he said the time had come for all South Africa to get behind the Springboks, and he said it wearing his Springbok cap. That really moved the team.”
Linga Moonsamy was more moved than he could have imagined. “We were so tense during the game,” he recalled. “We were so close at the end of it. The black and white groups in our unit: we were now indistinguishable. All of us going absolutely crazy with relief and joy.”
Some years later, Morné du Plessis came across Benazzi, the big French forward who nearly won the game for his side. Inevitably, they talked about that game, and Benazzi insisted that it had been a try, that the ball had crossed the line. But Benazzi also told Du Plessis, “We cried like hell when we lost to you guys. But when I went to the final the