The late Nelson Mandela was an amateur boxer and idolized American boxer Joe Louis, the black American fighter whose bouts with Nazi Germany’s Max Schmelling in the 1930s turned him into an American hero.
He credited the sport for allowing him to withstand 27 years of imprisonment, and the man who used the 1995 Rugby World Cup final to unite a nation by donning the Springbok jersey that had been reviled by South Africa’s blacks during the apartheid era always spoke about the egalitarian nature of boxing that had always appealed to him.
In his 1994 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela (pictured with star boxer Jerry Maloi) wrote that though he did not “enjoy the violence of boxing so much as the science of it,” he was “intrigued by how one moved one’s body to protect oneself, how one used a strategy both to attack and retreat, how one paced oneself over a match.”
“Boxing is egalitarian. In the ring, rank, age, color, and wealth are irrelevant…I never did any real fighting after I entered politics. My main interest was in training; I found the rigorous exercise to be an excellent outlet for tension and stress,” he wrote. “After a strenuous workout, I felt both mentally and physically lighter. It was a way of losing myself in something that was not the struggle. After an evening’s workout I would wake up the next morning feeling strong and refreshed, ready to take up the fight again.”
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