The Wisdom of Nelson Mandela…and the (Mostly) Peaceful Blessings of Sports

By Charlie Barber
Contributing Writer

That Nelson Mandela should use a sport as violent as rugby in 1995 to end race war in South Africa is not only one of the greatest achievements of peacemaking in history, but also one of great irony in the triumph of sports, and its dedicated athletes, over politics, and its cynical practitioners in government, boardrooms and the media.

Sports is too important for us to tolerate lying about it, regardless of how we let politicians and advertisers lie to us, or how much we lie to ourselves about taxes, crime, and drug addiction. Thus we have the spectacle of the FOX corporation offering candid sports reporting by former athletes, while its news desk has ill-informed shills manufacturing reality to fit its political agenda as blatantly as North Korea, Iran’s Ahmadinejad, or “Pravda” [“Truth”], the former Soviet Union’s version of “fair and balanced.”

In 1988, a year before the Berlin Wall came down, East Germany’s Katarina Witt skated to a gold medal in the Calgary Winter Olympics to a broadway melody containing the words “I gotta be me.”  Though missed by political reporters, Witt’s musical accompaniment was as potent a repudiation of the Soviet system as “Solidarity” in Poland, the Afghan mujahideen, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Russia itself.
 
In 2010 an NBC announcer covering the Vancouver Olympics also missed the obvious, liberating aspect of sports. With the “Cold War” long over, he remarked on the “strange” phenomenon of the Japanese woman who renounced her citizenship in order to pursue her Olympic [“I gotta be me”] dream as a Russian pairs skater. 
Most news reporters, even sports reporters, work for organizations which define “real news,” in terms of conflict, and the continuing drama that such conflict produces. Resolution of conflict, ie. peacemaking, is a process that is long, arduous, and by news media standards, “boring,” except, sometimes, after the fact. Covering such a process requires too long of an attention span for folks with daily deadlines.

Sports, however, are constantly providing resolution to conflict with “the thrill of victory,” and “the agony of defeat.”  A superficial observation, perhaps, but when one respects the sports that people play, one respects those people as well.

By understanding the love of Afrikaners for rugby, Nelson Mandela reached out and respected a white population, which though monstrously oppressive to blacks in South Africa, had themselves felt despised by the English there, and with good reason. The Afrikaners had had their own families rounded up and put into the first modern, barbed wire concentration camps by the British Empire in the Boer War of 1899-1902. Ninety three years later, Blacks, Boers and Britons were making peace on the Rugby pitch, as Mandela’s former jailer, Kobie Coetsee, put it:
“It [the Rugby Championship Cup Ceremony] was the moment my people, his adversaries, embraced Mandela. It was a moment comparable, I felt then, to the creation of the American nation. It was Mandela’s greatest achievement. I saw him and Pienaar there and I wept. I said to myself, ‘Now it was worth it…This endorses the miracle.”

Unfortunately, sports can be abused by nationalism, as George Orwell noticed in 1945: “At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behavior of the players but the attitude of the spectators; and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe—at any rate for short periods—that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.”

Orwell’s painful objections notwithstanding, the evolution of sports from sectarian contests to agents for social change can be seen in American baseball with Branch Rickey’s integration of the Brooklyn Dodgers with Jackie Robinson in 1947, or integration of baseball in Bismarck, ND in 1935 with Satchel Paige. 
Paige made it a point not to pitch in towns where he could not lodge or get a meal in a restaurant. Because he had a fast ball that no man, white or black, could hit, “Satch” got his way, and brought a championship to baseball-mad Bismarck. A friend of mine, the late Judge Robert Vogel, remembered the thrill of going to each game Satchel Paige pitched, since the father of one of his boyhood friends umpired those games.

Another example of sports fever overcoming segregation in the U.S. took place in 1966 with the victory of an all-black lineup of Texas Western U. in the NCAA basketball final over the U. of Kentucky, poignantly portrayed in the movie, “Glory Road.” 
Another “sports” movie. “Invictus,” also provides a moving portrait of Mandela’s achievement, but I strongly recommend reading the book as well. Its enigmatic first title, “Playing the Enemy,” refers to rugby, of course, but also describes an expert fisherman, playing his “hooked” enemies, and bringing them into the boat as friends. World Cup Soccer is coming to South Africa in 2010,—the most ethnically diverse and popular sport in the world. It is a fitting reward for a country that has shown the rest of us how to respect the fundamental humanity of sports, and turn swords of political conflict into plowshares of public peace.

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