Page 263 - SpringBoard_ELA_Grade7_Flipbook

aCTIvITy 3.20
continued
Comparing Text and Film
my Notes
2 “There was a cause-and-effect connection between the Mandela factor and our performance in the field,” Du Plessis said. “It was a cause and effect on a thousand fronts. In players overcoming the pain barrier, in a superior desire to win, in luck going your way because you make your own luck, in all kinds of tiny details that go together or separately mark the difference between winning and losing. It all came perfectly together. Our willingness to be the nation’s team and Mandela’s desire to make the team the national team.”
3 Robben Island was still being used as a prison and all the prisoners there were either Black or Coloured. Part of the day’s events involved meeting them, but first the players took turns viewing the cell where Mandela had spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years in captivity. The players entered the cell one or two at a time; it couldn’t hold any more than that. Having just met Mandela, they knew he was a tall man like most of them if not as broad. It required no great mental leap to picture the challenges, physical and psychological, of being confined in a box so small for so long.
***
4 After Mandela’s cell the Springbok players went outside to the yard where Mandela had once been obliged to break stones. Waiting for them was a group of prisoners.
5 “They were so happy to see us,” Pienaar said. “Despite being confined here they were obviously so proud of our team. I spoke to them about our sense that we were representing the whole country now, them included, and then they sang us a song. James Small — I’ll never forget this — stood in a corner, tears streaming out. James lived very close to the sword and I think he must have
felt, ‘I could have been here.’ Yes, he felt his life could so easily have gone down another path. But,” Pienaar added, recalling the bruising fights he would get into when he was younger, the time he thought he had killed a man, “... but mine too, eh? I could have ended up there too.”
6 Small remembered the episode. “The prisoners not only sang for us, they gave us a huge cheer and I ... I just burst into tears,” he said, his eyes reddening again at the recollection. “That was where the sense really took hold in me that I belonged to the new South Africa, and where I really got a sense of the responsibility of my position as a Springbok. There I was, hearing the applause for me, and at the same time thinking about Mandela’s cell and how he spent twenty-seven years in prison and came out with love and friendship. All that washed over me, that huge realization, and the tears just rolled down my face.”
Second Read
• Reread the text to answer these text-dependent questions.
• Write any additional questions you have about the text in your Reader/Writer Notebook.
10. Key Ideas and Details: Why does the author include the quotation from Du Plessis in paragraph 2? What point does it make?
236 SpringBoard® English Language Arts Grade 7
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