Goodes race row threatens to blight a brilliant career

By Ian Ransom MELBOURNE, July 30 (Reuters) - Adam Goodes once spoke of Australian Rules football being the purest expression of his Aboriginality, a heritage he understood little of early in his career but one he would embrace tightly after years of racist taunts on the playing field. His high school text-books offered few clues of his culture. His mother, forcibly removed from her family at the age of five and raised in state care, had little history she could pass on. Yet football has always seemed instinctive for Goodes, the link to his ancestors deep and compelling. Goodes believes modern 'Aussie Rules', the country's richest and best-attended sport, had its origin in 'marn grook', an Aboriginal game noted by 19th-century colonialists in which players jostled to catch and kick stuffed animal skins. Indigenous athletes have played an outsized role in the 150-year history of Australian football, but none have left quite the same mark as 35-year-old Goodes, both on and off the field. Powerfully built and sublimely skilled, his 365 games in the top-flight Australian Football League (AFL) are a club record at his Sydney Swans team and the most for any Aboriginal player. Only eight players have bettered the tally. In 2006, Goodes became only the 14th player to win a second Brownlow Medal as the league's best and fairest player, an award dating back 90 years. In local terms, Goodes' longevity, achievements and loyalty to his team would compare with a Ryan Giggs in British soccer or a Tom Brady in American football. Winding down his 15-year career, Goodes might have expected to enjoy a final victory lap of a season. Instead, he has been booed relentlessly by rival fans at grounds across the country and is said to be pondering an immediate retirement under the stress of the attention. Standing 1.91 metres and weighing 100kg, Goodes has never shied away from confrontation in the high-contact sport, where toughness is revered by coaches and fans alike. Yet he has worn the most bruises as a flag-bearer for indigenous people in a country where Aboriginals lag behind the mainstream in basic human indicators including life expectancy and child mortality. His father, who was of British heritage, left his mother to raise four-year-old Goodes and his two boys alone, a nomadic childhood in small rural towns where casual racism was prevalent on the football fields and on the high street. Goodes was at one point the only Aboriginal boy in his local high school and remembers how he was called a "coconut" by his cousins for not wanting to skip classes. He was 22 when he decided to report to his Sydney Swans club that he had been described as looking like a monkey by an opposing player during a match. The player would later apologise. "You've done something good for yourself. You've made it to the AFL and it happens again and you just think, 'when's this ever going to end?'" Goodes said in a 2012 interview. RACIST TAUNTS The AFL has worked hard to stamp out racism on the field and celebrates the contribution of Aboriginal players with an 'Indigenous Round' of matches each season but racist taunts still ring out from the terraces. Goodes took it upon himself to try to stop that and made his boldest statement in the Indigenous Round of 2013, on one of the biggest stages in the game. In front of 65,000 spectators at Australia's iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground, Goodes paused in play to have a 13-year-old girl ejected from the stadium for calling him an "ape". Captured live on television, the footage capturing Goodes's outrage and the teenager's distress as she was led from her seat by security staff sparked a raging media storm. "He's a pretty quiet, unassuming sort of guy (off the field) but very principled and passionate for his cause," AFL Players Association chief Paul Marsh told Reuters. "He's almost a Muhammad Ali-type figure but not quite as vocal in talking about himself." AFL players are booed regularly by fans for all manner of perceived offences, but none have ever been jeered as relentlessly through the length of a season as Goodes. His retirement in such circumstances would be little cause for cheer. (Editing by Nick Mulvenney)