Broadhurst Cona survived all the indignities that South Africa’s apartheid system could throw at him, including a racist law that forbade him from playing rugby on the all-white national team, the Springboks. He wasn"t going to let the coronavirus kill him. But his family wasn"t spared the pandemic"s grief. On Broadhurst Cona’s fifth night in the COVID-19 ward of Cape Town’s Groote Schuur Hospital, the patient in the bed next to him was giving up. The man gripped his own throat in panic as he choked, and he kept pulling off his oxygen mask. Cona pleaded with him to put it back on, but the man was beyond listening. Early the next morning, Cona awoke to a commotion. The man’s bed was empty, and nurses in protective clothing were spraying it down with disinfectant. He was sealed in a beige-coloured body bag, and it took four people to lift him away to a passage leading to the lift. Cona didn’t know it yet, because his companion had been too sick to speak and his face unrecognisable with pain, but he had seen this man many times before, as an opponent on the rugby field. The two had played in rival Black neighbourhood teams under apartheid’s racial segregation laws in the late 1960s. Cona had gone on to compete in international games with South Africa’s Blacks-only team over the following decade. He played against England, France and New Zealand’s vaunted national team, and also toured Italy. He was competing in a sport that, to many, had become a symbol of Afrikaner domination of the country’s majority Blacks, but it was a game that his broad body and determination were made for. The dead man, Phakamile Maqhasho, had never made it beyond provincial rugby, but the two had kept in touch. Cona had last seen him at the funeral of a mutual rugby friend four years back. Cona only realised it was him in the bed next to him when a friend sent him a copy of his obituary in a local Xhosa-language community paper some days later. Now Maqhasho’s funeral would be next, and Cona felt like he had witnessed what his own death from COVID-19 might be like. Would he ever again see his daughter and especially his son, who lived on the other side of the country? “I still say that was the most heinous legislation of the apartheid era. Because it destroyed the fibre of the community.” Broadhurst Cona on the law that tore his family from their home “I could be next,” he thought to himself, and sure enough, within 24 hours, the 72-year-old’s own condition had dramatically worsened, and he was gasping for breath. For decades, he had survived all the indignities that South Africa’s apartheid system could throw at a Black man: the bulldozing of his childhood home; his move to a Black township; a racist law that forbade him from playing rugby on South Africa’s all-white national team, the Springboks, despite his talent. Wheezing in his hospital bed, Cona made a vow. “I can’t have come this far to be killed by a virus. There’s no glory if I die in my sleep,” he would later recount. “Let me die fighting, on my feet, rather than in my bed.” That night, after barely four hours of sleep, Cona got up and started doing vigorous exercise: push-ups, chin-ups, jogging around the ward, even shadow boxing – with the novel coronavirus as his invisible opponent. His body was heavy as lead and his chest felt like it was about to explode with pain, but he just kept on training. The nurses urged him to rest, lest he injure himself falling, and he politely declined. He was going to fight this one out. Uprooted Cona had discovered rugby by accident, after the South African government bulldozed his family home. He was 6 months old when, in May 1948, the Afrikaner Nationalist Party representing the descendants of Dutch settlers came to power – and set about implementing its vision of an apartheid state, solidifying decades of racially discriminatory policies introduced by South Africa’s British former colonial masters. Two years later, the government passed what would be one of the most hated laws of the era: the Group Areas Act, which sought to keep the races apart by demarcating neighbourhoods where each was allowed to live. They grabbed all the best neighbourhoods for the white minority, forcibly relocating Black and coloured – as mixed-race citizens are called here ­– people into less desirable areas. Cona was a teenager when his family, who lived in picturesque seaside Simon’s Town, were uprooted to the township of Gugulethu. “I still say that was the most heinous legislation of the apartheid era. Because it destroyed the fibre of the community,” Cona told Reuters at his daughter Kholiswa’s house in the Black township of Langa, whose neat rows of bungalows built by the apartheid regime are now painted in riotous colours that previously were forbidden. Ironically, the forced relocation set him on a path that would become his life’s passion. There was no rugby team in Simon’s Town, and Cona had only ever played soccer, which has always been the more popular sport with the country’s Black majority. When he was 22, he joined a soccer team in Gugulethu. In one match, he played against a team whose players included Norman Mbiko, who also happened to be a coach of a rugby team, the Flying Eagles, in the nearby township of Nyanga. Mbiko would later recall noticing the stocky player who combined a blistering pace with a Herculean upper-body strength. “I could see he’d be good at rugby,” Mbiko told Reuters in an interview at his spotless red-brick home, whose wood-panelled interior was adorned with team photos and newspaper cuttings featuring him from his rugby days. “He was so fast for his big size.” So in 1969 Mbiko and another sports friend persuaded Cona to start playing rugby. Within a year, Cona had established himself as a powerful tighthead prop – one of the two positions in the front row of the scrum that are usually reserved for the team’s heaviest players – and rose up to play for the racially segregated Black Western Province team. Resources were scant. The pitch was mostly dirt, and they had none of the facilities the white clubs enjoyed, such as gyms or scrummaging machines. There was no changing room at Nyanga; they suited up in the open. Despite the challenges, in 1972 Cona and Mbiko were selected for the national Black rugby squad, the Leopards, with Mbiko as captain. Cona became known in rugby circles as “Broadness,” part wordplay on his size, part the result of a misprint on his “dompas” – the passes Blacks were required to carry every time they entered a white But it wasn’t until 28 years later, long after they’d both retired and six years after South Africa had transitioned to democracy with a historic election that brought Nelson Mandela to power, that their contribution to the sport would finally be recognised. In 2000, the two men received the thing they long had been denied during the apartheid era: the coveted green and gold blazers of the team that had for decades been the realm of white players alone, the Springboks. Balfour Ngconde, the sports minister under Mandela who had fought for the belated honor, bestowed the blazers on the men. “We were so excited. We had always been yearning to be on one platform, not separate ones,” Cona said. But it was tinged with bitterness. “While we were mingling afterwards, some of the guys said, ‘It"s only a blazer, it’s meaningless.’ And we all agreed. Because the whites who played are well-off now, but we had nothing.” “I was denied an opportunity” On a bright day in September, Cona surveyed the grounds of his old club in Nyanga, just down the road from Mbiko’s house. He picked up a rugby ball and jogged around the muddy, balding pitch practising some dummy passes, his cropped white hair flashing in the sun. He somehow managed not to sully his immaculate black leather shoes and dark suit trousers. His big frame had put on weight around the middle, but he was clearly still fighting fit. Mphakamisi Zali, 24, who plays for the club, joined his longtime hero, and they passed the ball between them. “It’s nice to have a legend like him back on our [rugby] pitch,” Zali said. “I don’t think he ever got the recognition he deserves.” Black South Africans’ relationship with rugby has long been fraught. Such was the resentment of the country’s white rugby establishment, township crowds would cheer the Springboks’ opponents – “we wanted anyone but them to win,” Cona said. A spokesman for SA Rugby, the sport’s current governing body, declined to comment on its apartheid-era predecessor. When Cona was playing back in the 1970s and early 1980s, tour cancellations and international boycotts of the racially segregated South African teams were mounting. Back home, anti-apartheid protests were erupting across the country.