The Brewing of Racial Storms - 16 July 1999

Sitting, these past few days, under - so to speak - the splendid skies of Carnoustie and watching Americans, in particular, struggling with or cursing what is in fact the original game itself - namely links golf - I thought back wistfully to a missing character whom I was with every day on the course, and certainly every evening in the bar, the last time the Open was played there. A waddling, chuckingly sly-looking man, some people would have called fat or overweight - he consented to be called portly.

He was just about my favourite sports writer. First because he had a hard-won style that looked as easy as falling out of bed but mainly for the same reason that more than half of his devoted newspaper readers knew absolutely nothing about his speciality - golf. Because Henry Longhurst simply used golf as the handiest mirror of human behaviour - its vanity, its fake modesty, its subtle skills, its punctured pride, its fierce competitiveness - all seething away under a surface of gentility and good manners.

Unlike most sports commentators, on television anyway, Henry practised what somebody said was best about the conversation of Macaulay, I think - brilliant flashes of silence.

And when, in writing, he wanted to make a positive or rude point, he said it simply and directly as in this sentence which I recalled sadly this weekend after I found myself one of an unbelievable 60 millions watching the World Cup final of women's soccer.

"It has long been my opinion, which is not a very original one, that many forms of sporting contests do a great deal more harm to international relations than good, and either should never have been started or should forthwith be abandoned. Foremost among these are the Olympic Games."

I'm sure if Henry were alive today and had seen the American-Chinese circus, he (not I mind you) but he would have been the first to write after the Olympic Games the abolition of the World Cup soccer matches - both male and female - could most usefully diminish international ill-will.

Well the day after the American victory this country - the media here - woke up in a stupefied daze to the fact - the new social fact - of women's soccer.

Three times in my lifetime there've been attempts to start a full time American professional soccer league. Great hopes held out, confident predictions it was going to replace football - twice it collapsed. The third time has been more successful but it has a long way to go to begin to threaten the 49ers and the Giants and the Broncos and all the other heroic boys of winter.

But here quietly to most of us on the side, unnoticed, unpublicised anyway, the women's amateur soccer movement was burgeoning and far better known outside this country than inside it. And then, to the astonishment I'm sure of most Americans who suddenly switched on their television sets - my own wife was one, and I quote her because as an advertising tycoon once said about his wife: "I trust her judgement absolutely because she's a cross-section."

Well my cross-section came into the study just as I settled to the great encounter - China versus the USA. As she walked in the screen showed an aerial view of the stadium and 90,000 hysterical humans.

"What," shouted my cross-section, "is this?"

I said: "It's the World Cup final, naturally you'd expect a big crowd."

Well it turned out that in this country the television ratings surpassed the last rating of the National Basketball finals - and don't forget basketball is the number one spectator sport in this country followed closely by football and then baseball and then on and on down and down to lacrosse.

Incidentally just above lacrosse is the noble game of golf. I mention it in passing as an interesting and possibly surprising, true statistic, that just over 6% of Americans have ever played golf, watched golf or read about golf.

In brief , 94 Americans in a 100 have never heard of David Duval or Annika Sorenstam or Ben Hogan or Bobby Jones. But now, suddenly, they know and are learning to worship Mia Hamm - the reigning star (we hear) of American soccer - and now Miss Chastain, who popped in the deciding penalty kick.

But - and here's what it's all about - how about Briana Scurry? The goalie - the player who was really responsible for the victory by blocking one Chinese penalty kick.

Watching the ecstatic closing ceremonies - the orgy of slapping and loving and embracing and screaming - a Disney caricature of the hysterical behaviour of the male of the species whenever he scores a goal - I did notice that we never had a single shot of Miss Scurry, who is black.

I noticed it, as many must have, in passing - so to speak - but within two days a report circulated round the Nation, came hurtling on to national television that blacks throughout the country were outraged and disgusted.

This swept away the main comment, which wondered why suddenly 60 million people became aware of women's soccer. There are about 15 theories on that and I won't bore you with any of them.

The main story, the big story, produced a 2,000-word piece in our number two serious newspaper - a paper so adverse to scandal it has never carried a headline wider than one column.

And it was the protest movement that swept the blacks because of the way Miss Briana Scurry was overlooked in the television finale to the big show. The network that carried the event has grovelled suitably but it would not be surprising if some heads - white heads - would roll.

This protest and its inevitable accompanying cry of racism happens to have coincided one week with three other national black protests - possibly indeed four protests and one, so to speak, inverted protest - I'll explain what I mean by inverted.

Williamsburg, Virginia is known far and wide to tourists to this country as the architecturally restored colonial capital of Virginia. Before the War of Independence made it necessary to have a capital at the head of a river, so as to be able to face and oppose the incoming, the in-sailing British - in other words before the capital was switched to Richmond - Williamsburg was not only the capital of Virginia but the Southern headquarters of the colonial revolution.

At the end of the 1920s it was discovered that Williamsburg had many old colonial buildings still left there bypassed by history, and because there was still extant and in good condition the street plan and the architectural drawings - even the interiors - of a Frenchman who'd been a British prisoner in Williamsburg during the War of Independence, a commission decided to restore the buildings, the streets, the gardens, the interiors, the whole place as it was in the 1770s and they did a wonderful job of it. I doubt there's another town which has so accurately restored, not only the buildings, but the 18th Century spaces of a town.

Some delicate English visitors are put off by the dressing up of the tourist guides in 18th Century costumes. This has never bothered me.

However, among the tourist features are film re-enacting some of the history and you can see carpenters and glass blowers, black craftsmen at their trade. One of the profitable sidelines of the whole venture is the copying of the fine furniture - the mirrors and so on of the time - and very splendid work it is.

But the corporation that runs the place has now added a feature - it is the sight, the process, done with chilling realism, of a black slave being beaten - being thrashed - and in the end having the wounds on his bleeding back being staunched.

Meanwhile up in the present capital, Richmond, another racial storm was brewing - the city decided to burnish its historical image for the tourist trade and set up some colourful reminders of the Civil War.

First, of course, was a great portrait of General Robert E Lee, an almost sainted figure in the South since in 1860 he sorrowfully turned down Lincoln's offer to lead the Union armies and chose to cross the river and lead, instead, the armies of his own Virginia.

No sooner was this picture mounted than a national association of black people made an angry protest - they wanted an equivalent black hero of the time. The city took down the picture of Lee, have found a (to whites) previously unknown black, restored Robert E Lee and put the black hero alongside him.

And fourthly in the same week the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples found or appointed an eloquent and angry spokesman who proclaimed, and was shown on national television doing it, that it was a disgrace that in the television programmes announced for the fall - in all the prime time shows - there was only one show which had a leading hero and heroine who were black.

Why? Nobody had the answer to that one.

It seems fairly sure that the timing of these protests was coincidental but they do together reflect an increasingly touchy consciousness among black people of feelings they've had for centuries which they feel should come out more and more in public.

We ought not to forget that in this country the past 45 years have seen more social and political progress for blacks than in any other country. That here, for example, more blacks of both sexes go through college than go through high school anywhere else.

We shouldn't forget, either, that America is a society in which the passion for social and political equality is a more powerful and consistent concern among minorities than the passion for liberty.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.