LockerRoom: I have no Gary Neville posters on the wall of my bedroom. I'm not in Gary's fanclub. I don't call him. He doesn't call me. Not even at Christmas. In my day I've told Gary Neville jokes, although never within 10 miles of Roy Keane.

I still chuckle childishly at the thought of his father having the christian name Neville. Still, I feel a little sorry for Gary.

Firstly, he must wish that he'd just punched Patrick Vieira on the nose rather than having Roy dash in like the caped crusader protecting a woman and her squalling children from an alien threat.

Second, he must wonder if his apparent interest in issues beyond the dressing-room door will ever earn him anything but derision. We in the dysfunctional sportswriting community bear our burden of guilt here. Constantly whining for more interesting athletes to fill our pages we tend to kick to death any sweatmonger who sticks his head above the parapet and offers an opinion on anything more complex than the use of old-fashioned wingers.

Neville commented during the week that Nike's involvement in the current football against racism campaign was opportunistic and commercially motivated. On sportswriters' laptops everywhere his comments were instantly stored on a file called Whining Millionaire Rent-a-Quote Knucklehead Trivia to be dug up and used against Neville sometime in the future when he does something commercially motivated.

Gary Neville was right though. Nike has no beliefs beyond self interest. Their involvement in the StandUp, SpeakUp campaign cheapens the entire process. You could give a million reasons why that is so.

You could start with the fact that the prestigious showcase NikeTown store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago is being sued at the moment for racial bias in its employment practices, the accusations including allegedly consigning black faces to the stockroom, following black customers around the store to check they aren't shoplifting and so on.

You could point to Nike's continued support for Springbok rugby even after Geo Cronje refused to share a room with a mixed race team-mate in 2002.

Why should they have walked you might ask? Companies don't do that. Well, Nike walked on several US universities when the schools affiliated themselves to the Workers' Rights Consortium, an umbrella group which monitors the use of third world sweatshop labour by large sporting apparel companies. Indeed Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, withdrew a $30 million donation to his own alma mater, the University of Oregon, when they signed up with the WRC.

(Nike prefers to offer its support to the government-backed, sports shoe company-funded Fair Labor Association which window-dresses as well as any Niketown store. As recently as three years ago a Nike factory in Pakistan was found to have eight-year-olds stitching footballs at near slave wages. Phil Knight himself has been forced to admit that "the Nike product has become synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse".)

Nike will shrug its big corporate shoulders and say "We just got cheap stuff. Who knew?"

Nike knew though. The company started out in the 1970s manufacturing mainly in Japan but when that got costly they shifted back to the US where they began to suffer lawsuits about mistreatment of workers. So they spread out the manufacturing bucks in a thin layer across the Third World.

When Nike plead ignorance and state with some justification that they are now catching up you could look instead at the effort which goes into their clumsy but voracious attempts at ethnic marketing. That Nike is an opportunistic omnivore was made pretty clear many years ago when some labour activists attempted to enrol Michael Jordan in an early campaign to improve the conditions in Nike's factories. Jordan kept his lips sealed, which was a different tack to when he was asked to lend support to a fellow black North Carolinian, Harvey Gantt, when Gantt ran for the US Senate against notorious right-winger Jesse Helms. "Republicans buy sneakers, too" said Jordan.

If Republicans are a market, so too are Chinese, in whose country Nike spends 152 million Yuan a year on advertising, and so are struggling black people who can ill afford the footwear their own icons push at them. Nike's understanding of these constituencies as anything other than markets is a little offensive.

In China an ad featuring basketball player LeBron James has caused widespread offence for its use of Chinese cultural icons and for an image where women in traditional Chinese dress are depicted with American dollars falling like manna all around them.

In the US, Nike's racial sensitivities have drawn the ire of even Spike Lee, who has worked for the company in the past. Spike says he "cringed" when he saw a Nike ad featuring the same LeBron James. In this one Le Bron was displaying his b-ball skills in an African-American church stuffed with a happy-clappy swaying congregation of basketball "names".

"That LeBron James ad where he comes in the church, where negroes are flying through the air doing somersaults (and) tomahawk dunks - to me that was sacrilegious. I defy anyone to tell me that they will see a commercial that will take place in a synagogue selling any kind of products, or a Catholic church. That was a complete mockery of African-American faith and the black church."

You could cite all these things and more but perhaps Nike's biggest and most worrying contribution to race issues is the least obvious.

We'll continue with LeBron James, the teenage superstar of the NBA and the company's principal shill. The kid was sucked from the ghetto outside Cleveland at 18 years of age and handed a $90 million Nike contract before he had ever walked on to a NBA court.

Forget for a moment what that does to LeBron James. Imagine the distorting effect it has on the world he leaves behind. Imagine trying to teach kids maths and science and all things useful when the jackpot is so clearly swoosh-shaped.

Nike takes it out, Nike scalps and scours the streets for talent or for customers but Nike doesn't put it back in. Nike displays its shills as wonder people and super heroes but offers no ladder, no other help.

Nike plays dumb on issues when it suits Nike. On race, on sexual discrimination - remember Woods on the "women in Augusta National" debate? Nope. Of course not. Nike sings dumb on drugs in sport and on solutions. Nike appropriates and shapes a large part of youth and sports culture but is wilfully insensitive to the rest of the world.

So shock, Gary Neville was right. He'll learn to shut up though because we sportswriters collude in making the fantasy as much as any Nike does. Jack Johnson was crucified by us for being too cocky, Jackie Robinson was crucified for being too arrogant, Ali was crucified for refusing induction into the Army, Cantona was crucified for intellectual pretensions.

The show's the thing. The show must go or we're all sunk. An article in The Nation magazine last summer asked "where are the jocks for justice?" The answer is simple. Hiding. From us and from Nike and from the risk of being laughed at for doing some joined-up thinking.

They are hiding from the type of journalism and celebrity worship that thinks that if Hitler had invaded Poland for charity it would have been quite laudable. Just because it's Gary Neville saying something doesn't mean it's stupid. Just because it's anti-racism which it's using as a marketing instrument doesn't make Nike right.