Australians, traditionally, don't take well to being told by governments, career executives on big salaries or media commentators about what social attitudes they should and shouldn't have. But the essence of AFL football is the players. If you don't respect the players, you don't respect the game. They are the ones who have the best chance of being listened to.

Traditionally, booing has been as much a part of the game as cheering. While I am not suggesting that the booing of Goodes is a mass exercise in racism, there is clearly a racist element. On Monday morning, I did a radio interview with Perth ABC. The speaker before me was a non-Indigenous West Coast supporter with an Indigenous wife who had gone to Sunday's match with their 10-year-old son. He quoted some of the explicitly racist comments he heard being called out in his vicinity; he also told of shouts of support for Goodes that he heard.

The popular dislike of Goodes is like a rope with several strands; one of those strands dates back to his time as Australian of the Year. Shocked by what he saw in John Pilger's documentary Utopia, about a remote Aboriginal community, Goodes was doubly shocked by mainstream Australia's indifference to the film and said it made him feel ashamed of being Australian.

Regardless of where the balance of opinion lies among non-Indigenous Australians on whether the booing of Goodes is racist, the view of Indigenous Australians I have heard on the matter is that the booing is racist.

After Goodes was booed by Hawthorn supporters earlier this year, it occurred to me that the Hawks could do something about it by having Shaun Burgoyne, Cyril Rioli and Brad Hill front a press conference in the week leading up to the next match between the two clubs. They could send a message to Hawthorn's supporters along these lines: "We represent you. You represent us. We're asking you not to boo Adam Goodes because it's not only him it's hurting – it's hurting us. When you boo him, you boo us".

I would be very surprised if there weren't other Hawthorn players who would stand with them. The abiding magic of team sports is that, by requiring its individual members to come together in a highly co-operative activity, they have a history of transcending racism.

The irony of Sunday's match is that one of the players subjected to the most overt racism and crowd hostility in the 30 years I have been covering VFL/AFL football was West Coast's Chris Lewis. The mass booing of him marred the 1991 grand final for me. I wondered how Lewis felt watching the treatment Goodes received last Sunday. I wondered, too, how Nic Naitanui felt. Naitanui is not Indigenous but, from my one meeting with him, I got the impression he was a pretty switched-on young man in the area of race politics.

I wondered also how former Swans "spiritual leader" and Fremantle assistant coach Brett Kirk felt watching the game. From conversations I've had with Kirk, I know the great depth of feeling he has for Goodes and Michael O'Loughlin, his former Indigenous teammates.

The situation with both the booing of Adam Goodes and the Aboriginal war dances performed by Goodes and Lewis Jetta is sad and getting sadder.

The haka is the great war dance of world sport, but it has a controversial history. In 2005, Lions captain Brian O'Driscoll had his shoulder dislocated in a spear tackle 41 seconds into a Test match after, it has been written, he was deemed to have responded to the haka with a lack of respect.

As Goodes said after throwing his invisible spear during the Indigenous round, war dances invite a response. The point about the Haka is that its use is highly controlled and, most importantly, it is directed at the other team and not, as Goodes and Jetta have done, at the crowd.

Big Jonathan Brown spoke well about the issue on radio on Monday morning. Now we need more players and former players to speak out. Goodes is a unique figure in the history of the game. Were this business to characterise the end of his career, or even contribute to the end of his career, it will be a shame on the game that won't go away.