![]() ![]() They aspire to a place on the team, but as some of the most gifted young, black cricketers have been saying, they want recognition for their talent, not their color. Idea of weakening a winning team by selection not strictly based on merit. Lulu Xingwana, chairman of the committee, has pledged the ANC to legislation next year to enforce black selection in national teams.Ĭricketers, rugby players, athletes of every rank and color, oppose legislation. Up and down the country, possibly presuming that votes will follow populist efforts to accelerate the pace of integration, leaders of South Africa's National Sports Council and the ruling African National Congress committee on sport clamor for black and mixed-race representation on the "lily-white" rugby and cricket teams. He knows the value of patience, the diplomacy of nudging progress along but not attempting to force the unenforceable. ![]() Mandela, of course will be there, not merely for the sport but to inaugurate officially South Africa's bid to be host of the World Cup in 2006. ![]() In the 80,000-seat, soon to be 120,000 seat FNB National Stadium in Johannesburg, South Africa begins a new era under a new coach, Trott Moloto, against an old adversary, Egypt, the African champion. But it isn't the nitty-gritty of how a match was won or lost that is important: It is the movement, the meaning, the momentous progress that has taken South Africa's most popular sport from the dark years of apartheid to a freedom which, symbolically, is celebrated on Wednesday with the Nelson Mandela Inauguration Challenge. The score probably best reflected Wits' flair for missing penalties - or for failing to beat William Okpara, Orlando's remarkable Nigerian international goalie - with either of them. On a soccer field not far from where Mandela was taken from his Sowetan home many moons ago, the Orlando Pirates on Saturday outwitted Witswatersrand University to win a South African Premier Soccer League match, 3-1. So it is in Johannesburg as Nelson Mandela's five-year presidency nears its end. The most enduring manner of bringing change to a country and the way it lives, in sport or outside it, is to free the chains and let progress run its natural course. The swiftest way for a man to cover the ground is to obey nature, to run as instinct dictates. ![]()
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