What will it take for an athlete to come out?

First, the question, ‘What will it take for an athlete to come out?’ needs to be qualified.  I want to limit the scope of this question to (1) a man, (2) an active professional, (3) in one of the four major sports, and (4) coming out to the public.  I place these limitations because without each of them, it actually has been done before, and most importantly, only if all four are satisfied will there be a opportunity to have a major effect on society.

Prior to answering that question, it is also necessary to understand why an athlete does not come out.  Ultimately, it is the same reasons why anyone stays in the closet: risk to health, livelihood, and social or familial relationship.  As friendship and family are considerations for everyone that comes out, regardless of profession, I’ll continue by focusing on the other issues.  An athlete is especially susceptible to fear for his health because he could be the target of a physical assault that is deemed an acceptable part of the game.  A professional athlete’s life is also more public, they are in a career that very few people in society can experience, and they only have a single option for an employer.  This all magnifies the ramifications of coming out.  If an accountant comes out, they fear that it may lead to an uncomfortable work environment or maybe they will be fired.  Thankfully, there are many companies out there that need accountants.  But there is only one NFL and only 32 teams.  If a player comes out, everyone knows, and there is no going back.

In my view, there are 5 developments that are necessary for an athlete to come out:

1) Society continuing its growth in accepting the gay community.

Although unrelated to the sports industry, society’s acceptance of the gay community resonates through the leagues, teams, players, and endorsers.  There has been very little progress in the sports industry since David Kopay came out in 1975, but society as a whole has become significantly more accepting.  As this continues, it will put more pressure on the industry to shed its homophobic identity, paving the way for an athlete to come out.

2) Support from the sports organizations.

I understand that the sports industry is a money-making machine and that each league and team fears supporting gay rights would affect their bottom line.  But what about the player’s associations?  Do they have to wait for a player to come out in order to press for discrimination protections to be incorporated into the collective bargaining agreements?  Obviously, they could do it now; there is just no pressure to do so.  They act on what they know their players want, and without a player stepping forward for protection of gay players, they have nothing to act on.  Maybe I’m too much of an idealist, but I’d think an organization with the purpose of protecting the interest of its members may act on the behalf of a silent minority.  Maybe they haven’t thought about it.

In fact, when Steven Fehr, primary outside counsel to the MLB PA, came to speak at Moritz, I asked him if a players association had an obligation to do just this.  The question caught him off-guard, and he said he’d never thought about it.  So maybe that’d be a good place to start: simply asking the owner, teams, players, and player’s association to start thinking about it.  I’ve considered a pretty small-scale letter-writing operation targeted at those individuals.  Does anyone know if there’d be any success in that?  I know there are several people in and around the sports industry that have vocalized their support of the gay community.  Maybe they’d be the best ones to contact first?

3) Support from the player’s team.

The locker room camaraderie for a professional team is known to be quite unique.  It is a brotherhood, a family, a group that has bled and sweat together, all united for a common goal.  With that, there is a certain level of trust in the locker room.  It often perplexes me how trust in your teammates is supposedly so vital to the success of the group, yet there is an expectation to keep a secret in order to maintain that trust.  That is a separate topic, by itself, I know, and I will surely rant about it and ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ sometime.  Surprisingly enough, I think acceptance of the team may be the easiest hurdle to overcome for an out athlete.  For one, Glenn Burke and I’ve heard others, have already done so.  I also think that just as gays are stereotyped, so too are athletes.  We want to see them as the dumb, close-minded, Neanderthal brutes, without considering that many of them probably have no problems with homosexuals.

4) A player, or group of players, with talent, courage, and thick-skin.

Ah yes, the most integral piece to the puzzle.  We need our Jackie Robinson.  Although the struggle is different, namely because a gay athlete can choose whether to face the challenge or not, there is plenty to learn from how Jackie did it.  First, and I hate that this is the case, the player will have to be talented.  It is easy for a team to get rid of a bench player, to make them insignificant, and cast them aside.  It would be hard to justify the same with your star quarterback, a consistent middle-reliever, or a starting point guard.  Issues also seem to become non-issues after a strong performance on the field.

Besides talent, Jackie was humble, unassuming, and had thick skin–all traits necessary to his success and will be necessary for a gay athlete to similarly break down this barrier.  There will be great respect for the player when being berated with slurs, threats, and stadium chants, he simply turns his other cheek.  Lastly, this player is going to want to come out and to be the role model.  Athletes do not always want to be role models (Sir Charles) and they can often avoid opportunities to challenge old-fashioned rhetoric or policies (Tiger Woods), but they certainly do have the platform to be a role model if they want.

5) Marketing.

After John Amaechi came out in 2007, Mark Cuban, a man who certainly knows a thing or two about money, said, “From a marketing perspective, if you’re a player who happens to be gay and you want to be incredibly rich, then you should come out. Because it’d be the best thing that ever happened to you from a marketing and an endorsement perspective.”  If Cuban is on to anything with this, it would sure alleviate the fear that coming out will threaten your livelihood.  The fear, however, is still rooted in the unknown: are all these companies actually going to be lining up for you?

Well, I don’t think it should ever get to that point.  I think an athlete would be foolish to come out without having done the legwork, rather, without having his agent do the legwork, for these endorsements in advance.  There may be a bit of a chicken and egg dilemma with trying to solidify a contract for an unnamed player, until that player comes out.  However, I think it’d be pretty easy to get some very warm leads.  This would be my approach as the agent: find a list of companies that are either gay friendly or have advertised to the gay community in the past; contact these companies saying you have a player wanting to come out and that your player is in the same range for marketability as name1, name2, and name3; mention the amount of publicity this player will get after they come out; then work on getting a commitment for the endorsement.  I really must be an idealist, because that seems like such an easy solution.  Or maybe someone is already working on it.  I sure hope so.

coming out, gay athletes, marketing, society