Mandela's lasting counterpunch
— -- I never met Nelson Mandela, but I stood outside his house with a hundred others in the barbed-wire ghetto of Soweto in 1995, one year after his election, wondering whether we might glimpse the great man.
Then I spent three days in that massive slum and saw what Mandela was up against. I saw it through the prism of sports in Soweto then, or what passed for sports.
Twenty dilapidated basketball courts for a part of Johannesburg that had 1.3 million people, half of whom were younger than 18.
There was a golf course called "Soweto Country Club," so hard-baked and tattered you were allowed to drive your car on its fairways.
Three thousand kids crammed like sticks of gum into Soweto's one public swimming pool.
No recreation centers, unless you count the mattress some kids had hauled out of the dump and were turning flips on.
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