essay on sports has the power to change the world

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Mandela Embraced the Power of Sports for Resistance and Unity

By Jeré Longman

• Dec. 5, 2013

His last public appearance came at the final of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Wearing a coat, gloves and a fur hat, Nelson Mandela seemed frail and dressed against something more penetrating than the evening chill.

Still, he waved from a golf cart and stirred a stadium built like a calabash, a hollowed-out gourd meant to symbolize a melting pot of cultures. Acutely, Mandela understood the power of sport to provide dignity and hope in the face of state-sponsored oppression, to undermine discrimination with resistance and to heal and to help unite a society that the racial segregation of apartheid had brutally divided.

“Sport has the power to change the world,” Mandela, who died Thursday, was often quoted as saying. “It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair.”

A boxer, Mandela belonged to a generation that adhered to the amateur ideal of sport, believing it possessed an intrinsic value and offered lessons in fair play, gracious victory and edifying defeat, said Charles Korr, an American historian and a co-author of “More Than Just a Game,” a book about soccer and apartheid.

It was not a naïve view, Korr said, but one that was savvy and pragmatic and rebutted the notion that sports and politics should not mix.

Mandela was kept isolated and was not allowed to play in the prisoners’ soccer league on Robben Island, a harsh penal colony off Cape Town where he spent 18 of his 27 years in incarceration. Still, he eagerly followed the league results and recognized soccer’s value to other prisoners in providing a sense of humanity and defiance.

“The energy, passion and dedication the game created made us feel alive and triumphant despite the situation we found ourselves in,” Mandela said in a film sponsored by FIFA, soccer’s global governing body.

Robben Island was also where Mandela reinforced his support for the international sports boycott against South Africa, under which the country was banned from the Olympics from 1964 to 1992.

In a sports-obsessed nation, Korr said, Mandela deeply understood the cultural significance of rugby, cricket, tennis and golf to the white minority and how international isolation damaged the apartheid regime’s sense of national identity.

Mandela became a huge fan of the activism of Muhammad Ali. A photo of the American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their gloved fists in protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics was also smuggled onto Robben Island, further validating for Mandela and other prisoners the value of dissent in sports in bringing social change.

“He definitely believed that sports and politics are entwined,” said Richard Lapchick, who was a leading anti-apartheid activist in the United States and is the founding director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.

“You could smuggle in trade, oil and currency, but if you had a sporting event, you couldn’t play in the dark,” Lapchick said. “He realized this is a sports-mad world, and it was the way that people in various countries learned what apartheid was really about.”

On May 10, 1994, Mandela became South Africa’s first black president after three centuries of white domination. After his inauguration, he attended a soccer match at Ellis Park Stadium in Johannesburg to see South Africa defeat Zambia. It was time to re-enter international sport, Mandela told the crowd.

Lapchick, who sat in the presidential box, said he asked Mandela why he had chosen to watch soccer — the favored sport of the black majority — instead of attending inauguration parties.

He said that Mandela replied: “I wanted to make sure our people know how much I appreciated the sacrifices made by our athletes during the many years of the boycott. I have no doubt I became president today sooner than I would have had they not made those sacrifices.”

A year later, at the final of the 1995 Rugby World Cup held in the same stadium, Mandela made a widely heralded gesture of reconciliation and nation-building that would have once been unthinkable.

Rugby was the preferred sport of South Africa’s white minority. For blacks, the springbok, the mascot of the national rugby team, was a symbol of tyranny. While imprisoned, Mandela said, he invariably rooted for other countries to defeat his own.

By 1995, full democracy had replaced apartheid, and although South Africa had but one black rugby player on its roster, the Springboks played the World Cup under the slogan “One Team, One Country.”

As the tournament opened in Cape Town, about five miles from where Mandela had been imprisoned, he told the players: “Our loyalties have completely changed. We have adopted these young men as our own boys.”

A month later, South Africa defeated New Zealand in the final in Johannesburg. Mandela ignored the counsel of many advisers and handed the trophy to the Springboks’ white captain, Francois Pienaar, while wearing a green jersey bearing Pienaar’s No. 6. On Mandela, an emblem of repression was transformed into something unifying and restorative.

“He told me thanks for all we’ve done for South Africa,” Pienaar said at the time. “I reciprocated, telling him we could never have done as much as he’s done for South Africa.”

Mandela’s gesture would be commemorated in the movie “Invictus.”

“He never showed bitterness; I don’t know if I could have done that,” said Mark Plaatjes, the 1993 world marathon champion, who left South Africa to escape apartheid’s strictures and became a United States citizen. “He knew how pivotal sports were to South African society and how important it was to keep the white people looking forward versus, ‘We need to get out of here; this could be bad.’ It allayed their fears, gave them hope that this could work.”

Mandela later became the godfather of Pienaar’s oldest child. It was sometimes said by prisoners on Robben Island that the thing they missed most was the voices of children. Once on a flight from Johannesburg to London, the South African golfer Ernie Els recalled, Mandela showed great interest and delight in his young daughter.

When he won tournaments, said Els, a two-time winner of both the United States Open and the British Open, Mandela often phoned his congratulations before retreating from public view.

“He always felt proud of what the athletes out of South Africa did for the country,” Els said. “Very proud.”

Of course, the moral persuasion of sport has its limits. Two decades after apartheid, the “rainbow nation” ideal of South Africa remains clouded by unemployment, AIDS and violence. And the country’s most visible sporting figure, the amputee Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, stands accused of murdering his girlfriend.

Still, under Mandela’s guidance, sport became a confirmation of possibility. It was his authority that landed the soccer World Cup in 2010. The world’s most widely viewed sporting event came to South Africa for a month, and as Mandela took his final public wave, satisfaction was surely mixed with farewell.

“In his view, it was validation of the new South Africa,” said Korr, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. “Mandela believed it showed the rest of the world they belonged.”

Lapchick said he considered Mandela and Ali perhaps the world’s two most beloved and unifying figures. When told that on the day of his inauguration, Lapchick said, Mandela humbly deferred and replied: “If I was in a crowded room with Ali, I would stop what I was doing and go to him. He is the Greatest."