Great Moments in Journalism are submitted by readers, and can be sent to this address.Today's Moment comes from a Joseph Epstein essay in the Wall Street Journal. Joe's a little upset that everybody's talking about the whole "black coaches in the Super Bowll" thing. Why, he wonders, do they have to dwell on the blackness? ("Lovie Smith, the Bears coach, and Tony Dungy, the Colts coach, are both African-Americans, and this will mark the first time that an African-American coach has brought his team to a Super Bowl. That there would be two African-American coaches with teams playing against each other was too big a journalistic bonanza to ignore.") We're going to forget about the legacy of racism that kept the keys to the head office in white hands for so long that even now there are a paltry number of black head coaches and just focus on the question at hand: How does Epstein view Dungy and Smith if not through a racial prism?

Tom Brokaw wrote a bestseller about the men in World War II whom he called "The Greatest Generation." My own nominee for the greatest generation would be that of those African-American jazz musicians — Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and others — who practiced their subtle art through decades of ugly racial prejudice while maintaining a high artistic standard and an unruffled elegance of demeanor. Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy strike me as the equivalent, in sports, of those men.

Also, they've got a natural sense of rhythm.

Aren't We Grand? [WSJ]