Boxing, Gerrie Coetzee has died: the white South African who challenged apartheid

He was the first African boxer to fight and win the world heavyweight title. Gerrie Coetzee, a South African, died at the age of 67: he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Great boxing met him in June 1979, and it was an overbearing entrance. In Monte Carlo he got rid of it with a tremendous knockout in the first round of Leon Spinks, the man who had toppled Muhammad Ali from his throne the year before before being himself dethroned in a rematch. It was the pass for the world climb, in the following month of October: in Pretoria, in front of almost ninety thousand spectators, he faced Big John Tate, a black American, in a match of enormous media coverage. Coetzee arrived with the label of ‘white hope’: it was fashionable to attach it to a white man who made his way into the heavyweights, thanks to his fasting in the most prestigious category that had lasted since the fifties with the Swede Ingmar Johanson.

“I am nobody’s hope, I fight for everyone, black and white.” Coetzee didn’t like that definition, and in Pretoria he really fought for all South Africans. Whites and blacks who – except for the time – were admitted to the stadium together. He fought, even though at the time he still didn’t know it, even for Nelson Mandela, that as a boy he had been a boxer and that in prison he listened to his exploits on the radio. Madiba did not forget him, and when the Apartheid regime was finally at sunset he wanted him next to him: “It was one of the most emotional moments when he called me to his office and revealed to me that he was my fan”.

Coetzee couldn’t beat Tate, just like he couldn’t beat the ex-Marine a year later Mike Weaver, who had ousted Tate and beat him in the thirteenth round. After that defeat Coetzee moved to the USA where he relaunched his career until he had his third chance in the world against Michael Dokes, a cursed boxer who later slipped into hell and ended up in prison. In Richfield in September 1983 it was the right time: Dokes was knocked out in the tenth round, Coetzee hit him with such violence that in the following days he underwent surgery for a fractured right hand.

The incumbent government in South Africa tried to exploit the extraordinary victory and the then Minister of Foreign Affairs Pik Botha went to meet him at the airport. A reign that didn’t last long, however: Greg Page snatched the title from him, who knocked him out in an incredibly longer eighth round due to a mistake by the timekeeper. The trend of seeking white hope lasted longer, until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the arrival of the giants of the East – above all the formidable Ukrainian Klitschko brothers – took away all meaning from that terminology. As for Coetzee, he couldn’t resist the charm of the comeback: he was bewitched a couple of times between 1993 and 1997, with mixed success. But the most important things he had already done, in the ring and above all outside.