As many of you know Mandela is now on life support and likely won't have long to live. Maybe many people have forgotten this but once upon a time Nelson Mandela was a boxer himself and remained a great follower of the sport into his late age, even showing up in support for boxing events held in the country. I've no idea how to post pics on this forum but there's some good ones in these links http://www.awesomestories.com/images/user/thumb_4cc07f893e.jpg This content is protected This content is protected This content is protected This content is protected posing with female boxer Gwendon O'Neil This content is protected You can read about some of his boxing history here: http://www.awesomestories.com/assets/mandela-the-heavyweight-boxer Even while he was imprisoned in an impossibly small cell on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela maintained a physical-fitness regimen. In his younger years, he was also a heavyweight boxer, as depicted in this photo (which was made for "Drum" magazine). It depicts Mandela on the roof of a Johannesburg building. Cropped out of the image is Jerry Moloi, with whom Mandela had been sparring. In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela describes his love of boxing (and why he did it): "I did not enjoy the violence of boxing so much as the science of it. I 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 onself 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. 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."
That really amaze me. He always came across to me from TV as a small & skinny type of a man, so I would assume that he was a lightweight, maybe a welterweight.
