Customer Reviews

Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

There has been plenty written about the master statesman Nelson Mandela, but John Carlin's story about how Mandela transformed his nation by leveraging the sport of rugby is truly inspiring. This book is a must read for anyone who has ever been discouraged from creating change. Mandela's mindset and approach to liberating his country is unmatched.

As one who has studied South African politics and is well aware of the significance of the 2005 world cup, I was very eager to read this book. Needless to say, this book was incredible.

John Carlin gives a sort of intimacy in this book. He sets up the story, giving the background of Mandela's life. In addition, he also interviews those that had an effect on Mandela's life either in prison, politics, or sport. This 360 degree approach brings the reader to a fuller understanding of the actions taking place and the emotions that drive them.

Mandela has always been a personal hero of mine, and this book reinforces that. Though this is a (modern) historical account, the recapping of Mandela's struggle and the change he has brought to his nation also acts as a feel-good story of triumph.

This book is an absolute masterpiece of writing, a true gem and one that will certainly melt the hearts of many. On the surface it is about a rugby match between South Africa's Springboks and New Zealand in 1995. But it is representative of much more because, as the author shows, this match helped bring together South Africa after the fall of Apartheid, healing, at least in a small way, the anger of the blacks and the fear of the whites that the new nation would reject them. This was clear when Mandela came to support the rugby team, which had been seen as a symbol of Afrikaner nationalism, wholeheartedly. The book is more than the game, it covers many important characters and their reactions on the day of the match. The author is certainly an expert on South Africa, having lived there as a journalist, and he understands the soul of many of the people of the country. He understands also the history of the Afrikaners, the tradition of the 'Bitter enders' who had fought the british to 'bitter end' in the Boer War. This is a very nice book, an important story and one that will surely inspire. Unfortunatly the story paints a perfect utopian pciture of South Africa, one that has not stood the test of time. With the murder rate the highest in the world, AIDs running wild, farm invasions and the prospect of a new president whose motto used to be 'bring me my machine gun', South Africa's 1995 rugby match may well have just been a moment of reconciliation that could not last.

Seth J. Frantzman

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.

The author raises this question toward the end of this very good book. It's a legitimate one to ask. Mandela takes on an almost supernatural aura as the action unfolds.

Playing the Enemy chronicles the birth of post apartheid South Africa and the unexpected role in this of an epic sports contest. It follows Mandela from the beginnings of his contacts with government officials while still in prison, through his triumphant release and election as President. But all this simply provides context for the narrative of a rugby match.

And what a match it was.

Mandela understood that before a new country of South Africa could come into being, what was required was the creation of a population of South Africans, something that had not existed in the era of the Afrikaners and numerous fragmented tribal groups. He seized on the sport of rugby as the unlikely vehicle to make this happen. Rugby had been the exclusive province of the Boer oppressors, and the name and colors of the national team were vilified among the black population. Mandela's amazing leadership turned this around, and the sight of black masses cheering for the Springboks conveyed a potent message of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Read this book to replenish your hope in human potential and possibilities.

Playing the Enemy is a very timely book. In these days when nations are often more divided than before, Nelson Mandela's instinct to show respect, friendliness, and common purpose with those who saw him as an enemy is a beacon that lights up the potential for all people to come together to accomplish more. John Carlin has used the Rugby World Cup imaginatively to illustrate the essence of President Mandela's approach. Mr. Carlin is a wonderful story teller, and you'll feel chills as you read the many great moments he brilliantly captures in Playing the Enemy.

Leaders have always used foreign enemies to bring their purpose together. Who realized that this could be done at the level of sport rather than through war as a way to unify a country where people were deeply suspicious (even paranoid) about one another?

I was glad to see that Mr. Carlin provided lots of background about how someone imprisoned for decades became the leader of a reconstituted nation in South Africa and went on to accomplish things that not even the most optimistic would have expected. President Mandela's story is one for the ages, and this way of telling the story makes it easier to understand for those who never saw South Africa during the Apartheid regime.

Although I had long studied and worked to help change the government in South Africa from the inside and outside, the political impact of the international boycott of the South African rugby team had been lost to me. I hope those who would like to encourage governments to behave more appropriately towards their people will remember this example.

Bravo, Mr. Carlin!

John Carlin's work is a thrilling, spine-tingling effort. Most of the book's protagonists can't recall their meetings with Nelson Mandela in regards to 1995's Rugby World Cup without breaking into tears. Carlin's genius is to make you see why this is the natural reaction. Here's a man who, as one player aptly puts it "spent 27 years in prison and came out with love and friendship. All that washed over me, that huge realization, and the tears just rolled down my face."

Though Mandela is as close as there is to a god walking this earth, it's his one-on-one people skills that take the day. His will is to win them over, one person at a time. That's why Clint Eastwood has named his upcoming film of this book "The Human Factor" (Morgan Freeman as Mandela, Matt Damon as Springbok captain Francois Pienaar).