AT THE start of their unconventional bonding weekend in the Deep South, Jack Straw risked offending Condoleezza Rice by dismissing American football as “rugby with commercials”.

By the time he saw Brodie Croyle throw a 44-yard pass to clinch Alabama Crimson Tide’s narrow victory against their arch-rivals, the Tennessee Volunteers, the Foreign Secretary was on his feet yelling alongside the US Secretary of State and 90,000 other fans.

Dr Rice, tipped as a possible future commissioner of the National Football League, had won him round to her favourite spectator sport.

But while Mr Straw fulfilled his goal of learning more about his counterpart’s roots, the three-day “backyard bilateral” left the South wondering if Dr Rice had a different job in mind after the State Department.

US Secretaries of State with their myriad international responsibilities rarely make official domestic visits. So when Dr Rice — in a 21-car motorcade — returned to her old primary school for the first time since she left aged 13, it was bound to raise questions about wider political motives.

Every candidate needs a base, especially one who has not been a governor or senator, and the US media virtually ignored Mr Straw while they worked themselves into a frenzy over whether Dr Rice was preparing to run for the White House in 2008. The crowds who lined the streets cheered as if the President were already in their midst.

She was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up amid the civil rights struggle that gave the city the nickname Bombingham and claimed the life of her childhood friend, Denise McNair.

Dr Rice took part in an emotional return to the 16th Street Baptist Church, where her friend was one of four girls killed by a Ku Klux Klan bomb.

At a chilly open-air service, Dr Rice said: “Denise was my friend. We played together, we sang together, we were children together and we played with dolls together.

“It was just a few weeks after Martin Luther King had said ‘I have a dream’ . . . I think that the girls’ triumph is the fact that the dream was not denied.”

We learnt from other speakers that the prodigal “Condi” could read music before she could read books, hit a softball like a boy, and played the xylophone in a marching band.

Carol Smitherman, a childhood friend, said: “The Condi I knew played dress-up with the Hunter girls across the street, walked on her tip-toes and was always friendly with a great big smile.”

Any successful US political campaign is based on the candidate’s “backstory” and they do not come more compelling than hers.

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