In late 2011, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell paid a visit to my barbershop in Harlem, New York, where we enjoyed an informal conversation about a variety of issues centering mainly on player safety and whether the game was becoming too soft.

During the conversation, Goodell talked about his days as a three-sport starter at Bronxville High School in Westchester County. He told the story of how, when Tuckahoe High School dropped its football program, he helped persuade Tuckahoe's star running back -- who was black -- to play on Bronxville's all-white team.

The punch line was that the player, Jimmy Roberson, wound up beating out Goodell for the starting job. Goodell moved to tight end.

Goodell did the right thing despite the consequences. He made the team better while also integrating it.

Fast-forward three decades. Goodell landed his dream job as NFL commissioner, but now, almost eight years into his tenure, he finds himself in a moral quandary. One of the team owners, Daniel Snyder, refuses to change Washington's nickname in the face of growing criticism that it is racist. This comes at a time when the NBA has been dealing with its own racially tinged scandal, ignited when the Los Angeles Clippers' owner, Donald Sterling, was caught on a recording disparaging blacks.

In some ways, Snyder's intransigence seems worse than Sterling's incoherence. In defending the use of the name Redskins, Snyder is defying a number of American Indians as well as President Barack Obama, who said in an interview with The Associated Press, "If I were the owner of the team and I knew that there was a name of my team -- even if it had a storied history -- that was offending a sizable group of people, I'd think about changing it."

Snyder remains tone-deaf to the major spiritual tenet that if even one person is offended, that is one too many, but Goodell, far from being the forceful running back who explodes through the line, has added to the divisiveness by tap-dancing in the hole. His standard reply is that he is sensitive to those who dislike the name and logo but that they are not, as he sees it, offensive.

Goodell likes to quote polls to show that some Indians are not offended by the Washington nickname.

Forget the polls, commissioner. You can get polls -- and people -- to say anything if the price is right. We saw that with Sterling and the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP, which had honored Sterling in the past and was preparing to give him its lifetime achievement award when the recordings of his racial remarks emerged.

But as he did when he was a football captain, Goodell needs to use his persuasive powers, this time to convince the owners that the Redskins brand is no longer good for business and that they should work with Snyder to come up with a new name.

Goodell has to know in his heart that Snyder is wrong, that we are in time of breathtaking change. He knows this because he has seen it in his own sport: The helmet-to-helmet contact that was once standard in the NFL is no longer acceptable, nor is a locker room culture built around hazing rituals.

And so it goes for Snyder. What was the acceptable ethnic norm when he bought the franchise is now viewed as disrespectful, even vile.

Snyder will fight, and he will dig in. He has engaged in the classic game of seeking out Indians who agree with his position and casting them as the norm.

This is a crazy game. There are 565 federally recognized tribes with about 1.9 million members. This does not include smaller groups that have not received federal recognition.

Snyder can find 100 individuals who say they are not offended. But in digging in, Snyder and, by extension, Goodell and the NFL are digging themselves deeper into a moral hole.

In the past two months, we saw the NBA turned upside down by racial issues raised in the Sterling scandal. Team owners pushed for a swift resolution, in large part because a majority of the league's players are black, and many of them protested and threatened to boycott playoff games. Indians do not have that leverage, but anyone who is offended has the moral authority to stop participating.

Last month, in a letter to The Washington Post, DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the NFL players union, said the Washington Redskins' name conveyed "racial insensitivity."

My own approach is that if Snyder will not move, I'll simply build around him. I've committed to stop using the nickname in public and in private, except in columns addressing the debate. Other journalists do the same, and some news media outlets are refusing to use the nickname in coverage.

There will, of course, be debates.

George Solomon, who was The Washington Post's sports editor for 28 years, said he probably would not have ordered a boycott of the nickname. Solomon said he felt it was not an editor's responsibility "to decide what someone should call their team."

"As an editor, you're supposed to remain objective and let the facts and the story go where it should go," Solomon said. "I just didn't think it was my responsibility to make that decision."

Asked for his opinion, Solomon, the director of the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism at the University of Maryland, said: "Mine is, over the course of years, that it's probably a pretty good idea for a name change. The whole issue has evolved; it's become a hot-button issue. It would make a lot of people feel happier if he changed the name."

Last week, a board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office canceled the federal trademark registration of the Washington nickname for use in connection with a professional football team. In announcing the ruling, the board said that "a substantial composite of Native Americans" found the team's nickname to be disparaging.

As he did when he was a high school captain, Roger Goodell has to put himself and his league on the right side of history.

Sports on 06/22/2014