Over to you, active gay major-league professional athlete.
The news Sunday that NFL prospect Michael Sam has come out as gay is a revelation. In doing so the University of Missouri All-American has basically thrown down the gauntlet before the NFL, daring them to pass on choosing a six-foot-three, 260-lb. star who brings brawn and brains in equal measure.
But the challenge has also landed at the feet of gay athletes already on the job.
That a 24-year-old on the cusp of professional football is putting his career prospects on the line by daring the league to accept him for what he really is—a loud, exuberant, pass-rushing defensive end who had a boyfriend in college—subtly shifts the responsibility for the next big move in sports’ rapidly evolving gay-rights movement to those already in the professional ranks.
“I want to own my truth,” he said in interviews with the New York Times and ESPN, in explaining his decision to come out. “No one else should tell my story but me.”
And now everyone knows his story, and as a result Sam will be the focus of the NFL from now though to the draft on May 8 and likely beyond.
If courage is being willing to put yourself at risk while knowing there might be significant negative consequences, Sam gets high marks. It’s one thing for an athlete to come out after their career is over or at the very end of it, as NBA journeyman Jason Collins did last April—it’s another when your career could be hanging in the balance before it even starts.
It will be interesting to see what happens next. If Sam gets some support—if some active gay athletes do decide to come out—then an inherently conservative and risk-averse sports environment will be less likely to use the “distraction” excuse as a reason to shy away from drafting Sam or signing any other player who happens to be gay. If there are enough gay players in the public sphere, there’s no distraction—it becomes business as usual.
It’s easy for me to say, agreed, but it does feel like a critical moment in the shifting cultural sands of professional sports.
Until now the ideal standard-bearer for helping gay athletes become accepted by the public, their teammates and the industry has always been thought to be a player so good and so indispensable that any “distractions” caused by him coming out would be swept away by the reality of his on-field contributions.
Winning trumps all.
But the chances of that perfect scenario unfolding are slim: There are only so many difference-makers in professional sports and the chances that one of them is both gay and willing to be the public face of a movement is mathematically remote. More likely is that among the 3,500 athletes in the four North American mainstream sports at least a few dozen are homosexual. So far not one of them has felt comfortable enough to go public about being gay.
Moreover, among the thousands of former professional athletes only a tiny minority have felt compelled to declare their sexuality publicly in retirement. The number is so small that their names are relatively well-known even though most of them were fairly anonymous when they played—athletes like former NFLer Esera Tuaolo and NBA journeyman John Amaechi.
So Sam, a major star in U.S. college football, by default becomes the highest-profile gay athlete yet.
Coming out now calls into question the real willingness of the NFL to tolerate an openly gay player in its macho midst. And what will remain to be seen in the coming months and throughout the early stages of his career is what impact being an openly gay athlete will have on his marketability to NFL teams. A survey of eight NFL player-personnel types by SI.com in the wake of Sam’s announcement suggests that the fallout could be considerable.
“[Being gay] will break a tie against that player,” one former NFL general manager said when assessing how Sam’s sexuality could affect his draft status. “Not that they’re against gay people. It’s more that some players are going to look at you upside down. Every Tom, Dick and Harry in the media is going to show up, from Good Housekeeping to The Today Show. A general manager is going to ask, ‘Why are we going to do that to ourselves?’”
The sad reality is if between now and the draft Sam remains an anomaly, his courage could quite likely be for naught: The fear mongers will win another round. Ultimately there will need to be strength in numbers if being gay and being a professional athlete will no longer be seen as mutually exclusive.
No one believes that Sam would be the only gay player in the NFL, should he get the chance to make the leap. Similarly there are peers elsewhere in professional sports that so far have remained silent. For Sam’s courageous step to have meaning beyond proving that professional sports is inherently conservative, bigoted and resistant to change, some of those athletes will need to speak out and join hands.
