As many as 200,000 turned out to greet Nelson Mandela in New York City on June 22, 1990, 130 days after his release from 27 years of captivity in a South African prison.

I bought this T-shirt outside Yankee Stadium, where Mandela told thousands of admirers: ''The people of New York, we admire you, we respect you and, above all, we love you." I'm thrilled to still have it, finding Mandela one of the few real heroes in an increasingly cynical world.

The New York Times reported the next day that Yankee Stadium rocked with a chant of ''Amandla! Amandla!'' the Zulu word for power, "Many in the crowd thought the word meant freedom or victory, but in the enthusiasm, it really did not seem to matter."