Gay matters

(Part 2)

Reactions are starting to build up around the announcement of former NBA center John Amaechi that he is a homosexual. The two-time Academic All-American from football powerhouse Penn State’s new book "Man in the Middle" will be coming out next week. In it, the British television personality talks about the terror of coming out in the NBA.

"It’s a testosterone-riddle group, and it’s not just the NBA; it’s professional sports," Amaechi told ESPN. "It’s almost ancient Greek in its philosophy. It’s the pinnacle of man. That’s what people think, what men want to be like, or something like that."

The locker room conflict his revelation would have created would have been a big issue while he was still playing.

"It knocks the deck and makes the music jump, so to speak, that the person I really love and support is gay," he adds. "The music stops for a second."

"I commend him for coming out. My mother always taught me that a real man understands who he is," says former teammate Donny Marshall, who grew up in an interracial household with an African-American father and a blonde, blue-eyed Swedish mother. "They’re not afraid to say who they are, to be black, white, Catholic, Christian, gay, straight, Republican, and Democrat, if you will. It’s not what you are that defines you, it’s who you are."

Marshall says it’s not a big deal, considering other guys have probably done worse and were accepted because of their performance.

"If you come to work and you get rebounds and you block shots, and you score for us in that low post, whatever you do off the court," Marshall continues. "Michael Jordan played with Dennis Rodman, who probably did things off the court ten times worse than John Amaechi ever thought about. As long as you do your job on the court."

William Daro "Billy" Bean, former Major League Baseball outfielder who announced he was gay in 1999 and wrote the book "Going the Other Way," says, "If we could only let athletes be judged by what they do on the court." In his first game for the Detroit Tigers in 1997, Bean tied a Major League record with four hits.

"What the media like to attach itself to, what makes an athlete marketable or not marketable is what they do off the court. We were not the only men who happened to be gay who played major league sports."

"It’s hugely important for the kids so they don’t feel alone in the world," says recently retired tennis legend Martina Navratilova, the first major international athlete to announce she was gay. "We’re role models. We’re adults, and we know we’re not alone but kids don’t know that," she said. "He will definitely help a lot of kids growing up to feel better about themselves."

But the situation was different for Navratilova. It’s easier to come out when you play in an individual sport, where you don’t have to share the locker room or team bus or plane with others. Some former NBA players claim that there was probably one on each team in their time, but who were just very discreet about their sexual preferences.

The argument is that if a superstar player came out, it would be less of an issue, because they weren’t "expendable" unlike a John Amaechi (6 pts, 2.6 rebs a game over five seasons), whose value would be outweighed by the discomfort they gave their teammates. Some say that steroid use and racism are still bigger than major teams would like to admit.

The question still remains: what would we do if we were in their place, both as the gay athlete, and as the heterosexual teammate? Would we feel like prey if we were the teammates, and at the very least unable to express our own biases? Or would we lash out because they made us uncomfortable?

Think about it.