It’s easy to focus on the competition aspect of sports; you can’t miss the drama of two highly trained and committed groups facing off to determine who “wants it more” or “has more heart” or whichever cliché the announcer currently prefers. In most sports, the goal is to score the most points or perform better than as many other people as you can. There’s usually a “winning” side and a “losing” side, or in the case of some individual sports, a ranking of first, second, and third place with all the other competitors relegated to somewhere below that. But that’s not necessarily where the real power of sports is felt.
The two books discussed below focus on the paradoxical power of competitive sports to actually unify disparate groups of people. In both Invictus: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation and The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White, race is the dividing factor. Sports, respectively rugby and basketball, bring people together in ways that no other medium could.
“Rugby was the opium of apartheid”
Invictus: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation
By John Carlin
And then there was Nelson Mandela.
Almost three decades of incarceration might be expected to have a hardening effect on a person, particularly when the initial conviction was unjust. However, Nelson Mandela used his time in prison to come to understand his adversary. He learned to speak Afrikaans, studied Afrikaner history, developed friendships with his Afrikaner jailors, and continued to reach out to the government leaders who had put him in prison. Eventually, this approach not only secured his release from jail and his election to the presidency, but also set his country on a path toward equality and reconciliation.
In the midst of this time of upheaval and radical change, South Africa was also preparing to host the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Rugby, for those who are as unfamiliar with the sport as I am, is sort of a cross between soccer and American football, but without any pads to cushion the ferocious impacts. Mr. Carlin explains the Afrikaner passion for rugby as “the closest they got, outside church, to a spiritual life” and Mr. Mandela himself once described it as “a religion” for Afrikaners. The black South Africans generally viewed the gold and green uniforms of the Springboks, along with the old national flag and national anthem, as a symbol of the oppression they had suffered under decades of apartheid. For years, they had cheered for whatever team the Springboks were playing against, urging a global boycott on South African rugby while apartheid was still law. And then Mr. Mandela determined that the best possible use for the sport of rugby is as “an instrument of political persuasion [and] reconciliation.”
To this end, Mr. Mandela worked with the disparate elements of South Africa, tirelessly lobbying, inspiring, charming, persuading and cajoling Xhosa, Zulu, English and Afrikaners alike into supporting the Springboks and his vision of South African unity: “One Team, One Country.” He encouraged the more vengeful anti-apartheid activists to soften their stance against the symbols they loathed and to give the country a chance to come together. He convinced General Constand Viljoen, the former overall commander of the South African Defense Force who led a right-wing group determined to take up arms against the new government, to stand down and renounce war. He motivated the almost-completely Afrikaner rugby team to learn the Xhosa words to the new national anthem “Nkosi Sikelele” and sing it and the old national anthem with equal gusto before each match during the tournament. In a triumphant ending worthy of a Hollywood film (which, as a matter of fact, it now is), the underdog Springboks defeated the heavily favored New Zealand All Blacks to win the World Cup and the entire country celebrated rapturously, regardless of color. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu explained, “That match did for us what speeches of politicians or archbishops could not do. It galvanized us, it made us realize that it was actually possible for us to be on the same side. It said it is actually possible for us to become one nation.”
Mr. Mandela’s optimism, charisma, and determination to engage all South Africans in the process of peace and justice prevailed against the fear and suspicions so prevalent at this turbulent time. And the sport of rugby was his instrument of choice in this extraordinary reconciliation.
“Basketball is a language we can all speak”
The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White
By Doug Merlino
When he was fourteen years old, Mr. Merlino played on a fairly unique basketball team. Half of the players were white, from the prestigious Lakeside School, the elite Seattle private school which Bill Gates had attended. The other half were black, from Seattle’s Central Area, a predominantly poor and African-American part of town. Of course, the team’s experience wasn’t just about basketball. It was about crossing barriers and expanding horizons. Despite being from extremely different backgrounds, the boys gelled as a team and went on to win the 1986 league championship. After that one season, the team disbanded and the players mostly went their separate ways, occasionally running into each other at games or on the streets of Seattle.
Then one summer day in 1991, Mr. Merlino picked up his Seattle Times to see the headline “What went wrong?” below the fold on the front page. Tyrell Johnson, one of his former teammates from that championship year, had been murdered and his body partially dismembered. As Mr. Merlino tried to piece together what had happened to his friend in the intervening five years, he became curious to know how the rest of the team had fared as well. Over several years he searched for and got reacquainted with his old teammates now in a wide variety of life paths including a King County prosecutor, an extremely successful hedge fund manager, a vintner, a health insurance broker, a Pentecostal preacher, a prospective longshoreman, two teachers, and a city auditor. He also discovered that almost all of the players from the Central Area had done at least brief stints dealing drugs, and several had a criminal record. None of the players from Lakeside had.
The team’s organizers, one black and one white, each the father of a player on the team, worked to get their athletically talented players accepted into the elite private schools that had so much more to offer than the public schools, including a better chance of getting into college.
The coaches were successful in placing several black students in these elite overwhelmingly white schools, only to discover that often the students needed more long-term support to navigate the truly foreign world they encountered. Many of the black players experienced poverty, family instability, and a lack of any positive support system. Some found structure through gangs which led them into drug-dealing, some found religion, others had family to lean on, several were transformed by becoming fathers. Granted, this is a small sample of individuals, but there was such a stark contrast between how much easier it was for the white kids who came from moneyed and privileged backgrounds to make the transition out of high school, into college and on into good-paying jobs, and the continual struggle it was for the black kids who were surrounded by drugs, poor role models, and constant financial hardship.
Mr. Merlino summed up his experience on the basketball court with this team succinctly: “We all had the same goal and our own set of tools for getting there. Everyone was, for the moment, equal to everyone else.” At the reunion scrimmage held more than two decades after their last game, another one of the players, Damian Joseph, reiterates “Everybody has problems…not just people who happen to be poor and black. It’s not just us having the issues, it’s everybody having the issues. It’s just in a different area. So that’s why the whole experience [of playing basketball together] works for everybody.”
For each of those teenage basketball players, the year they won the league championship was a bright spot in their memories, but not for the trophy. In fact, “the dominant memories were of joking around during the van rides” to and from games. During those times, they could be “just kids having fun and forgetting, temporarily, Lakeside, the Central Area, whatever individual ruts we were in at school and at home.” As Mr. Merlino concludes, “It was a vision of transformation, of our better selves.” A vision of unity that the sport of basketball enabled.
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On My Bedside Table…
Just finished: Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention by Katherine Ellison
Now reading: Beneath a Marble Sky by John Shors
Next up: Then They Came for Me by Maziar Bahari
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Baseball and hockey are up next week! Come find me on goodreads.com or email suggestions, comments, and feedback to egeddesbooks (at) gmail (dot) com.