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| Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation | 
 enlarge | Author: John Carlin
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $11.94
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Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 2811
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 1594201749
Dewey Decimal Number: 968.065
EAN: 9781594201745
ASIN: 1594201749
Publication Date: August 14, 2008
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Product Description
A thrilling, inspiring account of one of the greatest charm offensives in historyNelson Mandelas decade-long campaign to unite his country, beginning in his jail cell and ending with a rugby tournament
In 1985, Nelson Mandela, then in prison for twenty-three years, set about winning over the fiercest proponents of apartheid, from his jailers to the head of South Africas military. First he earned his freedom and then he won the presidency in the nations first free election in 1994. But he knew that South Africa was still dangerously divided by almost fifty years of apartheid. If he couldnt unite his country in a visceral, emotional wayand fastit would collapse into chaos. He would need all the charisma and strategic acumen he had honed during half a century of activism, and hed need a cause all South Africans could share. Mandela picked one of the more farfetched causes imaginablethe national rugby team, the Springboks, who would host the sports World Cup in 1995.
Against the giants of the sport, the Springboks chances of victory were remote. But their chances of capturing the hearts of most South Africans seemed remoter still, as they had long been the embodiment of white supremacist rule. During apartheid, the all-white Springboks and their fans had belted out racist fight songs, and blacks would come to Springbok matches to cheer for whatever team was playing against them. Yet Mandela believed that the Springboks could embodyand engagethe new South Africa. And the Springboks themselves embraced the scheme. Soon South African TV would carry images of the team singing Nkosi Sikelele Afrika, the longtime anthem of black resistance to apartheid.
As their surprising string of victories lengthened, their home-field advantage grew exponentially. South Africans of every color and political stripe found themselves falling for the team. When the Springboks took to the field for the championship match against New Zealands heavily favored squad, Mandela sat in his presidential box wearing a Springbok jersey while sixty-two-thousand fans, mostly white, chanted Nelson! Nelson! Millions more gathered around their TV sets, whether in dusty black townships or leafy white suburbs, to urge their team toward victory. The Springboks won a nail-biter that day, defying the oddsmakers and capping Mandelas miraculous ten-year-long effort to bring forty-three million South Africans together in an enduring bond.
John Carlin, a former South Africa bureau chief for the London Independent, offers a singular portrait of the greatest statesman of our time in action, blending the volatile cocktail of race, sport, and politics to intoxicating effect. He draws on extensive interviews with Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and dozens of other South Africans caught up in Mandelas momentous campaign, and the Springboks unlikely triumph. As he makes stirringly clear, their championship transcended the mere thrill of victory to erase ancient hatreds and make a nation whole.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
Elegant encomium August 17, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
John Carlin's wonderful book further illustrates the sheer genius of Nelson Mandela, the politician. For those of us who predicted that apartheid in South Africa could only end in a bloody deluge, "Playing the Enemy" proves that miracles are possible when even just one man who holds a position of moral authority is determined to avert disaster.
A book about rugby? Don't be fooled. This is so much more... September 3, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
If you read nothing else this year, get your hands on "Playing the Enemy" and read pages 201 to 253.
It won't take long.
By the time Nelson Mandela walks into that stadium, your heart will be pounding. By the time he walks into the Springboks locker, you'll be in tears. And you'll cry pretty much straight through to the end.
All because, on June 24, 1995, the South African Rugby team beat New Zealand to win the Rugby World Cup.
If you're like most Americans, you know that Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison --- 18 of them in a tiny cell on Robben Island --- and emerged without hatred to spearhead a peaceful transfer of power in South Africa. But you probably know nothing about the 1995 Rugby World Cup match. John Carlin's brilliant book corrects that, and, along the way, presents a concise biography of a remarkable man.
In these pages, Nelson Mandela is a brilliant politician with a genius for disarming his enemies. To Mandela, everyone is human, everyone can be reached. The only question is how. In prison, he would introduce his lawyer to his "guard of honor" --- and his jailers would find themselves shaking hands with an attorney they loathed. And he used his dead time in prison to teach himself Afrikaans, read the Afrikaans newspapers and familiarize himself with Afrikaner history.
Rugby is the favorite sport of Afrikaners, the dominant white tribe in South Africa --- "apartheid's master race." All but one of the 15 players on the Springbok team were white. In a stadium that held 62,000, 95% of the crowd would be white. No wonder that blacks saw the Boks as a symbol of oppression.
"Don't address their brains," Mandela believed. "Address their hearts." One direct way to do that was through sports. People love their teams; the connection is purely emotional. If the Springboks could come to engage both blacks and whites, that might end the sense among blacks that sports in South Africa was "apartheid in tracksuits" --- and might make whites more accepting of blacks as equals.
Mandela did not just lay out a goal. He met and charmed the white lords of rugby, then lobbied for the World Cup to be played in South Africa. He invited Francois Pienaar, the Springboks captain, to visit him and encouraged him to see his sport as "nation building". Soon the team was learning how to sing "Nkosi Sikele", the black national anthem. And, because a storybook fantasy was becoming reality, the Springboks advanced steadily to the World Cup finals.
The pages that are your homework begin on the morning of the championship game. One of Mandela's bodyguards got an idea: Mandela should enter the stadium wearing a green-and-gold Springbok jersey. Mandela improved on the idea --- his jersey, he said, should have Pienaar's number on it.
Across town, the players had been staying at a hotel. To calm their nerves, they went out for an early morning jog. As they left, Pienaar recalled, "Four little black kids selling newspapers recognized us and chased after us and started calling out our names --- they knew almost everyone on that team --- and the hairs on my neck stood on end... It was the moment when I saw, more clearly than ever before, that this was far bigger than anything we could ever have imagined."
Five minutes before kickoff, Nelson Mandela walked onto the field to greet the players. To the Springbok jersey, he had added a Springbok hat. "When they caught sight of him," Carlin writes, "the crowd seemed to go dead still." And then the chant --- from the almost all-white crowd --- began: "Nel-son! Nel-son! Nel-son!"
I'm going to leave it there, so as not to spoil the magic of the next pages for you. Just know that what happened in that stadium that afternoon was a crazy quilt of glory: atonement, forgiveness, liberation and celebration. It's the kind of event that happens when people who have known only hatred and fear drop the burden of history and move past their differences. Winning a game? That day South Africa climbed a mountain.
It is a measure of the quality of this story that Morgan Freeman is producing a film based on the book --- and playing Nelson Mandela. Matt Damon will be Pienaar, the South African rugby captain. And Clint Eastwood is slated to direct.
I guarantee you: Audiences will cheer. And weep. And these will be tears of joy, because --- for once --- a national leader had perfect pitch, and all of his countrymen knew it, and they all got it right.
In other countries, even in our own, skeptics doubt that this kind of brotherhood can be engineered. It can be. It was.
riveting and essential August 19, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is one of those incredibly rare books which is both thrilling to read and morally uplifting. The 1995 Rugby World Cup provides a wonderful fulcrum for Carlin to talk about South Africa and the genius of Mandela as both a man and politician. The chapter about the mostly white team learning the anthem of black South Africa is worth the price alone.
A sporting fairy tale August 20, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a wonderful book. Extremely well-written; it tells the tale of how Nelson Mandela used his political genius to win over Afrikaners and convince black South Africans to embrace a sport that most of them had come to despise as a symbol of the hated white majority. It really makes you realize what a political miracle it was that South Africa did not descend into complete civil war and what a blessing it was to have Mandela as the country's leader. The chapters discussing the game and the players' awakening political awareness are incredibly moving. A testament to the power of sport as political theatre, and the power of forgiveness and reconciliation.
First Book I'll Ever Read Twice September 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
knew of mandela the man but knew nothing about his personal story and the amazing triumph of the 1995 Spingboks. The books reads very personal and I definitely recommend to any reader, any age.
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