AS one black icon continues to fragment before our very eyes, another may get a new and deserved lease of life in the land of the free.

Tiger Woods’ exit at the first hurdle of the first World Golf Championship match-play tournament of the year coincided with news from America that a vociferous campaign to posthumously pardon Jack Johnson, the world’s first black heavyweight boxing champion, is gathering pace.

While any boxing fan would support the move to remove the stain of a three-year jail sentence served by Johnson after he was the victim of political and racist manipulation of law, it’s hard to feel too much sympathy for Woods’ plight.

The man who straddled golf for close on a decade amassing an unparalleled amount of earnings, as well as majors and other titles, has not now won for more than a year ever since the seamier side of his private life was trawled across the world’s media.

Now I am not one for invasive intrusion into privacy by the media. Private lives should remain private unless in the case of authority figures whose concealment of scandals ill-serves the public interest or smokes ominously of hypocrisy.

Woods is in that second category.

Without doubt he cultivated an image, almost venerable, certainly linked to family-values and American apple-pie wholesomeness, that so richly appealed to covetous sponsors from whom the Tiger brand derived yet more wealth.

But when the goody-two shoes were found to have mud all over them, that appeal waned, sponsors pulled out and others baulked.

Since Woods has returned to the circuit after a self-imposed exile to sort out his self-confessed “misdemeanours” his playing success has also dramatically crashed.

But put Woods’ downfall into the context of that which plagued Johnson and it pales in comparison.

Let’s be truthful. Johnson was no saint. A serial womaniser, a conspicuous splasher of the cash, Johnson was brash and flash. More importantly he did not try to convey any other image. What you saw was what you got But “Papa Jack” was black. And that was his biggest mortal sin to a world of rampant white supremacy whose creed was to obliterate any threat from non-Caucasian stock.

Even as Johnson proved himself in countless bouts across America that he was a worthy challenger, boxing’s heavyweight world title was off limits to a black man, an abhorrent case of sporting apartheid captured brilliantly in Geoffrey C Ward’s superb biography of Johnson entitled Unforgivable Blackness.

Johnson finally got to fight for the world title in 1908 when he shocked the world by defeating Tommy Burns in Australia. Murder – literally – broke out back in America, where blacks were beaten, battered, bruised and lynched.

Ward recalls a passage from a book of the time which declared: “It is far better that negroes, if fight they must, should fight amongst themselves. No crowd is ever big-hearted enough, or ‘sporting enough’ to regard an encounter between white and black with a purely sporting interest.”

When former world champion Jim Jeffries was persuaded to come out of retirement to put down Johnson, the Omaha Daily News reported his mission was “to restore to the Caucasians the crown of elemental greatness”.

Racism was not confined to America. Worldwide film footage of Johnson’s demolition of Jeffries was banned from certain countries for fear of being inflammatory to the white race and in England the church, and a government minister by the name of Winston Churchill, stepped in to halt a proposed fight between Johnson and the homeland’s Billy “Bombardier” Wells.

Despite his prowess as one of heavyweight boxing’s greatest fighters, the showman Johnson was always a target and was finally nailed under the Mann Act, in other words the White Slave Act, which banned the transport across state or national borders of “any prostitute for debauched purpose”.

Johnson was then married to a white prostitute. You could almost hear the word “gotcha”. He was – illegally – given a three-year jail sentence, which he served when he returned to America after a seven-year exile fighting across the world.

It is right and fitting that one of sport’s best athletes should have that stain on his life removed even if it comes 65 years after his death.