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THAT Nelson Mandela was a fighter is not news: he spent his life battling evil in the cause of good. But that he was a boxer is a myth.

A boxer, that is, in the sense of an athlete stepping through the ropes to lay leather on an opponent in the cause of amateur honour or professional reward.

Mandela never threw a punch in anything more than the scripted anger of a sparring session. He did, however, train as a boxer at the Donaldson Orlando Community Centre, now the Soweto YMCA, alongside more notable pugilists.

Their nicknames and those of the venues they fought at, usually in and around Johannesburg, capture the colour and the circumstances of the time.

Eric "Black Material" Ntsele and Freddie "Tomahawk" Ngidi could be seen in action at places like the Bantu Men's Social Centre and Uncle Tom's Hall.

Perhaps the best of them was Jerry Moloi, who lost his first seven bids for what were called the "SA-Transvaal [non-white]" versions of featherweight and lightweight titles before he stopped an opponent listed only as German Mauser Mhlambi in the 10th round on March 25 1961 to claim the lightweight crown.

Moloi is central to the myth of Mandela the boxer: he was the other fighter in Bob Gosani's famous photographs of Mandela sparring on a rooftop.

The black-and-white pictures are a superb study in the gritty, noir reality of being black in apartheid SA.

Mandela's bare left hand is slung low. His bandaged right is cocked and guarding his chin. He is coiled in readiness. His eyes are hooded and focused.

"I was never an outstanding boxer," Mandela wrote in Long Walk to Freedom. "I was in the heavyweight division, and I had neither enough power to compensate for my lack of speed nor enough speed to make up for my lack of power...

"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 ...

"It was a way of losing myself in something that was not the struggle."

After his release from prison, Mandela's involvement with boxing was that of a fan, albeit a superfan.

For all his popular sainthood, Mandela was not above pulling strings behind the scenes.

On the morning of the fight between Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson in Memphis in 2002, he called promoter Rodney Berman and asked for four tickets.

"I didn't tell him the truth - that there was no way I could get them; they were all sold out," said Berman, who was told something similar when he asked the broadcasters if any tickets were available.

Berman resorted to buying the tickets from a scalper for the equivalent of R35000, and Mandela attended the fight.

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