South African Brutus used sports for social activism

Nelson Mandela's embrace of the mostly white national rugby team as a unifying force in the early days of post-apartheid South Africa makes for a fine movie. "Invictus" - Latin for "unconquered" and title of a British poem Mandela supposedly used to inspire rugby captain Francois Pienaar - certainly needed no Hollywood embellishment of how sport can be dramatically colorblind, grab headlines and therefore wield surprising power.

Mandela (wonderfully portrayed by Morgan Freeman) really did see the chance to narrow the brutal black-white divide with a "one team, one nation" strategy when South Africa hosted the 1995 Rugby World Cup tournament - while fully aware of the historical reality that rugby was the white man's sport. Pienaar (Matt Damon in the film) and the rugby Springboks really did visit Robben Island, experiencing something of an epiphany where Mandela had been imprisoned for 27 years for agitating for blacks' rights. Mandela really did wear the rugby team's green Springbok hat and jersey in front of 65,000 fans at the World Cup final, which really did result in a stunning upset of powerful New Zealand and cast a favorable international light on South Africa's fledgling attempt at harmony.

A tougher story to put on the big screen - though inextricably linked to sport, to its central role in challenging apartheid and to Mandela himself - would be the life of Dennis Brutus, who died in late December, the same weekend that "Invictus" debuted.

Compared to the charismatic Mandela, Brutus was physically unimposing - "elfin," in one description following his death. By profession, he was a poet, a soft-spoken intellectual who taught for years at Northwestern and Pittsburgh during long stretches in exile from his native South Africa. Upon meeting him in the 1970s, during the seemingly endless cycle of Olympic boycotts for various causes, I was afforded Brutus' thoughtful reasoning on the use of sport for political cause.

He obviously was bright and better informed than most people in the world of fun and games, yet I hardly got the picture of what he really was, a fiery and brave revolutionary in the long fight against the institutionized racism that existed in South Africa from 1948 to 1990. He was of African, French and Italian ancestry, classified as "coloured" in his native country and therefore prohibited from all manner of human activities, certainly including the whites-only national rugby team. He once recalled his anger that a white man sarcastically referred to him as "a future Springbok."

In spite of repeated arrests, Brutus wrote a sports column dealing with the politics of race and sports, founded the South African Sports Association to campaign against the all-white monopoly on the playing fields and established the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee that led to South Africa's 1960 ban from Olympic competition because of its apartheid government.

At one point, Brutus was shot in an attempt to escape custody and almost died waiting for the blacks-only ambulance to arrive. He spent 18 months on Robben Island in a cell near Mandela, breaking rocks along with the future president, and eventually fled to London, then the United States.

All the while, he continued to use sport as a means to isolate his nation for its racist policies, leading boycotts of tennis tournaments and other competitions that welcomed only white South Africans. Richard Lapchick, director of the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport and a friend of Brutus for 40 years, said Brutus "might have been the first sports social activist" in his eulogy for ESPN.com.

In 1992, with apartheid officially ended and South African athletes welcomed back into the Olympic family after 32 years of isolation, the resurrected Mandela - two years out of prison and two years before he would be elected president of South Africa - suddenly appeared strolling through the Olympic village in Barcelona, trailed by a half-dozen reporters and TV cameras.

A colleague and I followed, stumbled into a small, ad-hoc press briefing and, given the accidental opportunity, tossed a couple of questions Mandela's way. His answers then - "Let's let bygones be bygones. Let's concern ourselves with our presence here. I urge you to come along with me, to forget the past and get on with the future" - are echoed in the "Invictus" script of reconciliation and hope.

There are reports out there that Mandela, in fact, did not provide the poem "Invictus" to Francois Pienaar, with the final grabbing lines, "I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul." In real life, he instead may have given Pienaar an excerpt from Theodore Roosevelt's "The Man in the Arena" speech from 1910, which included this:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or whether the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

Either way, in the end, the film is true enough. But I couldn't help trying to read every line in the long list of credits, hoping to see Dennis Brutus' name.