Learning to live with Goody and Lovie

LockerRoom:Some time late last week, with Kafkaesque improbability, my brain turned into nacho cheese. I realised, albeit fuzzily, that I was probably going to be mentioning Jade Goody for the second successive week in the Monday-morning nice-work-if-you-can-get-it column you are now reading.

It is of course part and parcel of the standard contract here in IT Towers to issue a barely stifled yawn when speaking about such fluff and to begin any sentence connected with Goody and her evil deeds with the words "from what I can make out" and to finish the thought with a mitigating explanation for your apparent familiarity with the subject matter: "The kids/the servants/the bar staff in the golf club were watching it the other night."

All comment on Jade Goody is to be committed to print only if using a typeface called "Eyes Rolled Towards Heaven" and so on, yada, yada, yada. (It also helps if you mention Kafka in the first paragraph.)

The key to the global crisis which cowered us all last week was the Orwellian media manipulation of the faceless folk at Endemol (Orwell! See!) but the flames were fanned by blurred understandings of racism and the difference between behaviour being overtly racially motivated and behaviour which is underpinned by an almost subliminal racism which finds expression only in times of stress.

I consider myself to be among the half-dozen most politically correct people or species types in the world but watching Jade Goody being forced to confront the worst of herself the other night by a censorious media whose own racism differs only by degrees of insidiousness I found myself putting down my well-thumbed copy of Bronowski's The Ascent of Man and watching in horror.

All those times when you nod uneasily at the taxi driver who's spewing out his nonsense about darkies and immigrants, when you see the bus driver shake his head towards the black face which presents itself at the door just as the bus is about to pull away, and so on, just imagine all those little moments of guilty, passive compliance being shown in front of a mixed-race audience.

In Ireland we are just at the start of the process of learning to share the island. The whole Jade Goody business should have been instructive to us, living as we do in a society where casual racism passes generally without comment at all.

Watching the Jade Goody business made an odd backdrop to a week of quiet anticipation concerning the outcome of yesterday's Conference games in the NFL. The Conference deciders are essentially the semi-finals for the Superbowl, and this year, curiously, the games were all about race.

The US has evolved a bit further in matters of race than Britain or ourselves, but as Bill Clinton pointed out during the OJ crisis (tsk, I was rereading Dostoevsky that summer and caught fragments of it), very few Americans ever talk about race to people of a different race.

This week the sports media were full of chatter about race. In Chicago yesterday (a city with a lamentable history of race relations, one in which our own rosy-cheeked Paddies played their shameful part) the New Orleans Saints were playing the Chicago Bears.

The Bears, oddly for a big, blue-collar, smash-mouth football type of town like Chicago, are coached by a black man. More than that he is called Lovie Smith (his parents having been so sure he would be a girl they never came up with an appropriate fall-back name). Not only are the Bears coached by a black man but they are quarter-backed by another, Rex Grossman.

Not just that even - they are driven by a defensive tackle called Tank Johnson.

Tank is an interesting fellow. He is currently under house arrest following his third run-in with the law in 18 months, which happened just before Christmas when police raided his modest 3,500 sq ft house and found six weapons, including two assault rifles as well as a quantity of marijuana.

A couple of nights later Tank's bodyguard William Posey was shot dead in a Chicago bar.

Should last night's game have seen the Bears through to their first Superbowl since the days of William "The Fridge" Perry, well, Tank Johnson is going to have to go to court to ask permission to travel. Currently he is allowed leave his house only for practice and games.

You can imagine the sort of racial debate surrounding a game like last night's. If the Bears were to win, the Superbowl would welcome a black head coach for the first time. If the Indianapolis Colts were to go through from the other game, the Superbowl would see two black head coaches face each other.

The mood surrounding such a possibility was self-congratulatory but Lovie Smith put it well when he said, "I hope for a day when that would go by unnoticed."

If the New Orleans Saints were to progress, America would feel just as good about itself. Gridiron football (which has a playing population which is just about 75 per cent black) plays to a white audience which could convince itself easily that a Superbowl for New Orleans would be a sticking plaster for the wounds inflicted just over a year ago when Hurricane Katrina left evidence of a horribly racially divided society.

Then there is the Tank Johnson issue. Tank could just as easily be white trash hauled from a trailer park to superstardom and celebrated in slightly larger print because he is the great white hope. Instead he's a screwed-up black kid from the screwed town of Gary, Indiana, and although his race is never mentioned there is a lot of rolling of the eyes and a good deal of racial subtext in the comments made on Lovie Smith's loyalty to a "troubled player".

When you look at the indices of a nation's ability to cope with issues of race, perhaps the behind-the-back comments of three talentless reality creations aren't the best place to start.

In the NFL, a fascinating man called Fritz Pollard was a racial pioneer. He played college ball for Brown University back when the last century was young and against the gentlemen of Yale (among many others) was forced to endure chants of "Catch the nigger! Kill the nigger!" He had to change and travel separately from his team-mates. Later he became the first black head coach of a pro football team. That was from 1923 to 1925. The second black head coach, Art Shell was appointed in 1989. The NFL has seven black head coaches right now (from 32) and they remain statistically the quickest fired.

Fritz Pollard was an epic talent but when the NFL found its feet and stabilised it banned black players for 12 years from 1933, feeling that the game no longer needed the "novelty" of black players to increase gate attendance. Pollard always believed George Halas, one of the charter members of the NFL, was responsible for keeping him out of the good times.

Never one to brood too long, Fritz Pollard went away and formed his own independent pro team, called the Brown Bombers. When he finished playing he ran a movie business based in Harlem (Suntan Studios, he called it). He published a black weekly newspaper there and was a talent booking agent for the Apollo Theatre in Harlem.

He was an income-tax accountant, a coal-mining entrepreneur and Paul Robeson's first agent. His son, also Fritz, won a bronze medal for hurdling at the Berlin Olympics. Fritz senior lived a full life but he carried the resentment of George Halas (whom he had known since childhood in Chicago) to his grave.

Last week Lovie Smith tried to sidestep the race issue and other controversies in Chicago and spoke about how he would like to win the NFC Trophy and the Superbowl for the Chicago Bears owner, Virginia Halas McCaskey, daughter of George Halas.

If Lovie pulls it off there will be great celebrating and Chicago will feel good about itself. And why not? Lovie is the poorest-paid coach in the entire NFL, something the body which lobbies for black management positions is powerless to do anything about.

The lobby group is called the Fritz Pollard Alliance. They've come a long way. We have a long way to go.