Playing the Enemy [Audiobook, Unabridged] [Audio CD]

John Carlin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2009

John Carlin, former South Africa bureau chief for "The Independent", chronicles the 1995 rugby World Cup victory by South Africa, which united a divided nation following the recent election of Nelson Mandela to President. This title offers a moving and passionate account of how South Africa avoided a bloodbath. This title is shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year in 2008 and now a major movie directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon. 24 June 1995. Ellis Park in Johannesburg. The Springboks versus The All Blacks in the Rugby World Cup final. Nelson Mandela steps onto the pitch wearing a Springboks shirt and, before a global audience of millions, a new country is born. This book tells the incredible story of Mandela's journey to that moment. As the day of the final of the 1995 Rugby World Cup dawned, and the Springboks faced the All Blacks, more was at stake than a sporting trophy. When Nelson Mandela appeared wearing a Springboks jersey and led the all-white Afrikaner-dominated team in singing South Africa's new national anthem, he conquered white South Africa. "Playing the Enemy" tells the extraordinary human story of how that moment became possible. It shows how a sport, once the preserve of South Africa's Afrikaans-speaking minority, came to unify the new rainbow nation, and tells of how - just occasionally - something as simple as a game really can help people to rise above themselves and see beyond their differences. This recording is unabridged. Typically abridged audiobooks are not more than 60 per cent of the author's work and as low as 30 per cent with characters and plotlines removed.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Carlin offers the final dramatic chapters of how then president Nelson Mandela and his wily strategy of using a sporting event—the Sprinkboks rugby team in the 1995 World Cup—to mend South Africa. Carlin, a senior international writer for El País, quotes Mandela: Sports has the power to change the world.... It is more powerful than government in breaking down racial barriers. After giving an informed capsule history of apartheid's bitter legacy and Mandela's noble stature as a leader, the scene is set for the influential rugby match between the solid New Zealand team and the scrappy South African squad in the finals of the World Cup, with 43 million blacks and whites awaiting the outcome. All of the cast in Afrikaner lore are here—Botha, DeKlerk, Bernard, Viljeon—as they match wits with Mandela. Carlin concludes this excellent book of redemption and forgiveness with chapters that depict how a divided country can be elevated beyond hate and malice to pride and healing. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in a South African prison because of his position as the military leader of the African National Congress, the leading anti-apartheid organization. Amazingly, while inside, he actually increased his influence as a resistance leader. In 1994, after his release, he was elected South Africa’s president in the country’s first free election. Realizing that his new government was on tenuous ground and could disintegrate at any moment, he sought a symbolic moment that would unite the black citizenry with white Afrikaners and hit upon the idea of South Africa hosting rugby’s first World Cup. The first step was to convince South Africa’s national team—the Springboks—to get aboard. Mandela’s charm, determination, and patriotism won them over to the point that the team wound up singing the national anthem of the black resistance movement in a much-replayed television spot. Improbably, Springbok—once the sporting symbol of Afrikaner dominance and arrogance—advanced to the cup finals, gathering more fans, black and white, with each win. Carlin, former U.S. bureau chief for the Independent, was assigned to South Africa during the transition from white to majority rule. He personally interviewed most of the principals involved in this fascinating story and undertook the project with Mandela’s blessing. A new slant on the familiar but always inspiring saga of Mandela’s rise to power. --Wes Lukowsky --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Audio CD: 9 pages
• Publisher: Wf Howes; Unabridged edition (May 1, 2009)
• ISBN-10: 1407434918
• ISBN-13: 978-1407434919
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,499,747 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Carlin is senior international writer for El País, the world's leading Spanish language newspaper, and was previously the U.S. bureau chief for The Independent on Sunday. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Wired, Spin, and Condé Nast Traveler.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

75 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book about rugby? Don't be fooled. This is so much more..., September 3, 2008

By 

Jesse Kornbluth "Head Butler" (New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (Hardcover)

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 François 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.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inspirational and a Reminder How Great Leaders can Change the World, December 4, 2009

By 

John G. Jazwiec (Chicago IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (Hardcover)

I read this book over a year ago. I was pleasantly surprised to see it made into a movie. The book was well rated by the NY Times but it was hardly a best seller. I spent my time reading this book, marveling at Mandela from lawyer, to a prisoner who charmed his captors, negotiated with the government in secret, always without malice and never lost his dignity through it all. That was inspiring, but more so was how he brought together his country using the a World Cup Rugby Match. You are not human if you dont find yourself crying at what he accomplished. Mandela never had a lust for power, he ran the country and then retired. He never used his incarcertion to get back against people. Having Morgan Freeman playing him (the voice of God) is a particularly strong metaphor and remind us that leaders like Mandela come once in a generation.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Elegant encomium, August 17, 2008

By 

Hard to fool "addie" (Texas) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (Hardcover)

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.