His name was Abram Thwala.
Competing in the 48-kg class in the boxing tournament at the 1992 Barcelona Games, he was clearly overmatched in his opening bout against a Spanish fighter, who rode the support of a home crowd to a 9–0 decision victory at the dumpy old arena in the gritty suburb of Badalona where the sport had been consigned.
It was more than just a fight, though, more than a one-line result in the record books. Thwala was the first black athlete to compete as part of the first multi-racial South African Olympic team.
Apartheid was dead. The sports boycott had been lifted. A new nation was being built under a new flag, with myriad challenges and complications ahead, but now as part of the global community.
Sitting in the stands that day was the living embodiment of all that. When the bout was over, he headed for the exit.
“Hey, Sam,” I shouted. “Can we have a minute?”
Sam Ramsamy, by then the head of South Africa’s national Olympic Committee, had long been a familiar figure in the anti-apartheid movement. But naturally the focus was on his companion that day: Nelson Mandela. It was just the two of them. No security. No entourage.
The questions for the president were all of the obvious ones: What does it mean? How did it feel? What does it symbolize? What does it say for the future that this young man fought for his country here?
“I think,” Mandela said, “that he should have used his jab more.”
Mandela was a boxer, remember. And though he did indeed go on to address the importance of the moment, the first thing he wanted to talk about was the fight.
As Mandela lay dying, so many paused to once more appreciate one of the towering figures of our time.
Sport is a tiny footnote in the larger story, but this is also one of those rare instances when the games we play to entertain and distract ourselves actually take on a meaning far beyond sports writers’ clichés.
The boycott really did make a difference. South Africa was, and is, a sports mad country, and though those passions, like everything else in the apartheid era, tended to divide along racial lines, everyone understood what it meant to be isolated, to be ostracized, to be denied the right to play along with rest of the planet. Rogue tours and Zola Budd and other flashpoints especially brought that message home, but it was also there whenever the world gathered to compete in the sports South Africans were most passionate about—rugby, soccer, track, cricket—and they were forced to watch from a distance.
Sport also played an important role in the ongoing process of building a post-apartheid South Africa. Everyone knows the Invictus story from the 1995 Rugby World Cup thanks to the Hollywood treatment with Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, but there have been other significant moments as well, large and small.
Big things, like the return to the Olympics in 1992, and a first appearance in the soccer World Cup in 1998. Little things, like seeing individual athletes who began their careers under the cloud of apartheid embracing change (Gary Player, not known for being warm and cuddly and cooperative with the press, sat down and waxed positively poetic for a half-hour when asked what it felt like to compete under the new flag.)
In 2010, South Africa hosted the soccer World Cup, and despite dire warnings about crime and logistical nightmares, it came off pretty much without a hitch (albeit at an enormous cost), save for a few eardrums blown out by vuvuzelas.
Mandela made what would be one of his last public appearances before the final match between Spain and the Netherlands at the new Soccer City stadium in Soweto, a quick golf cart drive-by and wave. Though fleeting, his presence was like a benediction, a final affirmation that this great big gaudy FIFA-enriching carnival actually mattered purely because of where it was.
But my most powerful memory from that summer isn’t of that stirring, emotional scene. It is of a conversation with a supporter of the Blue Bulls rugby team—if you know the place and know the sport, you know that means white, and almost certainly of Boer heritage—talking about what happened when one of their matches was shifted to Soweto because their home ground was temporarily unavailable.
He and his confreres were antsy at first about crossing the great divide into a place that was just down the road from their homes, but which they had never once entered. But then they were welcomed, they ate, they drank, they sang, some of the locals wore their colours for the day, and all of that seemed a revelation.
It was just a game, of course, and when it was over it was over. Sport, by itself, doesn’t change a thing.
But Mandela, the old boxer, understood that it could start a conversation, that returning to the world athletic community would have enormous symbolic importance, that one country cheering for one team could help begin the process of uniting what had forever been divided.
And he knew, also, that even in the biggest fight, everything starts with a jab.