Freeman - Photo David Sifry CCA
The Six Nations has been running in one form or another since 1883 and oozes history and nostalgia in its own right. So when the BBC were preparing to show this year’s tournament it was only natural that they turned to a man who has rugby in his soul - Morgan Freeman.
Morgan Freeman opens Six Nations coverage, the BBC’s website proudly announces. And sure enough, if you follow the links through you get to a video clip of him reading stirringly from the poem Invictus. If you can’t be bothered to click away to another page, don’t worry - it basically sounds exactly like this:
So what’s the significance of Freeman here? Ah, he was in that film of the same name, which is promoting itself shamelessly at the moment. It’s about rugby, so it’s fine. Not northern hemisphere rugby, mind, but rugby. Well, politics, really, the film’s more about poliltics and human rights and the end of apartheid as framed by the successes of a rugby team, but yeah, kinda about rugby. And Freeman was playing Mandela, so that’s… fine. And of course he was reciting that poem, you know, Invictus, which really resonates with rugby fans because of that exchange between Mandela and Francois Pienaar - except of course that that isn’t true and Mandela actually gave Pienaar Roosevelt’s The Man in the Arena to read instead.
Wait. So why is that the intro again?
[...] Nations matches down, and the tournament has failed to live up to the waxy poetry afforded it by Morgan Freeman and the BBC. The Irish were described by Brian O’Driscoll as “mediocre” against the Italians, [...]