An inspiring story to start with - Mandela winning the hearts of ALL South Africans and Pinaar's World Cup winning Springboks.
I remember how they broke the rugby world's hearts when they beat a
Jonah Lomu-led All Blacks team... on hindsight, probably deprived arguably the best known rugby player ever a world cup winning medal.
Who can forget Nelson Mandela's story of forgiveness and inspiration?
The film? Well.... Morgan Freeman as Mandela is a no brainer and he didn't dissapoint. Matt Damon was casted for his great acting skills and not his rugby skills nor knowledge - obvious. Clint Eastwood's direction was great.
Inspiring film overall.
However, we don't get the deliberate factual twist though...
Tthe story surrounds a hand written passage president Mandela passed to his rugby captain Pinaar. This same passage helped Mandela though his years in prison, and consequently helped Pinnar inspire his team to victory.
In Real life... it was a quote from a famed Theodore Roosevelt speech titled "
The Man in the Arena" the Sorbonne in Paris
, France on April 23, 1910.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where 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, 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.
In the film (and the title)... they changed it to the short poem by the English poet
William Ernest Henley
:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Both powerful... maybe they just want a more poetic passage.
