Ok Americans he's BRITISH, so when he says "Football" he means "Soccer."
Last week it was announced that the Football Association was postponing the launch of a short film intended to herald the organisation's new anti-homophobia initiative. Not a single prominent player had been prepared to support it.
Never mind no one in football ready to come out as gay, no one was even willing to reveal themselves as tolerant of the cause. Which came as no surprise to John Amaechi.
The former basketball player – in the Nineties the highest paid British team sportsman – came out as gay in 2007, the first NBA professional ever so to do. And the response to his own decision has made him aware of what it takes publicly to announce homosexuality.
"I personally have spoken to 10, 12 current professional footballers who are gay, they exist, I promise you," he says. "As it happens none of them have asked me if they should come out. But if they did, I would tell them not to. I'm not a gay right activist.
"I don't insist that they be a Joan of Arc. Why? Because that is what would happen: they would get burned at the stake. And how does that help anyone?" Isn't that a little dramatic?
"Not for a young player, who is not yet established it isn't. The fact is, you're more likely to be hit by a meteor than to make it as a Premier League footballer, so why add another reason why you might not make it?"
But if it were clear to the wider public that there were as many gay players as he suggests in the game, surely it would change things forever.
"This is one of the few sports where we have a previous example," he says. "And no, it didn't change things. Justin Fashanu came out [in 1990] and we saw what happened. He was destroyed. It killed him. Literally. Can we honestly be sure any of that has changed?
"I think the mistake we make is that we're looking at the footballers as if they are the problem. The FA framed the argument that because no gay footballer is brave enough to come out, homophobia will continue to exist. But it's not the job of the minority to make the environment safer."
Amaechi knows about what happens to players the moment they step out of the closet. The most significant basketball player Britain has produced, he was employed in the US for nearly a decade until he retired in 2003. But throughout that time he kept his sexuality to himself in the certain knowledge revelation would jeopardise his career.
"If nothing else, three of the States I worked in – Florida, Utah and Texas – were among the 32 where you could be fired for being gay. Gay activists often tell me if I'd come out while playing I'd have made more of a difference. It perhaps suits me not to believe that. But I honestly think I would have lost my job and what good would that have done? We don't need any more martyrs."
It was always a public announcement Amaechi resisted. His family had known for years he was gay. His team-mates had long sensed he was not as they were.
"They knew," he says. "For a start I was different because I was a Brit and because I was smart, which is not something to be in a locker room. So they weren't really surprised there was something else about me. Someone might ask me: 'Hey you never talk about women'. And I'd say: 'Yeah there's a reason for that.' And that was all that needed to be said."
But does not his experience suggest that dressing rooms are more tolerant places than the wider imagination might hold them to be? Surely his own experience should give sustenance to those who remain in the closet that things are not so bad once they step outside.
"It was a limited acceptance," he says. "I had to keep quiet about it. While the guy on this side of me in the locker room could talk in graphic detail about the woman he had sex with last night who wasn't his wife and that was considered acceptable discourse, I couldn't even mention who I had been to the cinema with last night, because it was my partner. The rule was, I was a silent gay. It was only allowed as long as you don't make any reference to it."
Why was that? Did he sense his team-mates were genuinely frightened he might molest them?
"This is the strangeness," he says. "The athletic environment is one where rules are different: you look at goal celebrations, take that out of the context of football and into a shopping mall, when does a guy do that to another guy in public?
"In the locker room nudity and frankly homoerotic activity is the norm. I found that more disturbing than encouraging, all that arse slapping. I didn't like to join in, which oddly made me different. I had to keep quiet while they slapped each other's arses.
"I'm sure that is going on in Premier League dressing rooms right now. It is frustrating, exhausting and an anti-cohesive way of going about things. I'm convinced the sense of resentment that built up within me was part of reason I wasn't as good as I should have been."
Which is the principal reason why he believes things have to change: so that people can get better at their jobs. Since leaving the sport, as well as promoting basketball in his own centre in Manchester, as well as sitting on 2012 advisory boards, Amaechi qualified as a behavourial psychologist.
His practice is in the workplace, helping companies improve their performance. And he is convinced that tolerance has hugely beneficial knock-on effects.
"I've worked with big pharmaceutical companies, banks, apparently far more evil organisations than football and they can get this right.
"They don't do this out of the goodness of their hearts, some would say they don't have a heart. They do it to improve their own internal performance. Tolerance makes better workers. Those 10, 12 footballers who have contacted me about this issue, get this right for them and you would have 10, 12 better players."
Why? "If you imagine a person has a finite amount of psychic energy, by that I'm not going all clairvoyant, I mean in a scientific way. Imagine if you are in an environment that makes you conform to a pattern that is not you, then you have to focus a considerable amount of that energy every working second on living the lie that you are not different. That energy is then not available for the task in hand.
"Sport is determined by incremental differences, those little one and two per cent changes that produce victory. Well there's one. Put it in simple terms, everyone performs better when they are relaxed."
And it is not solely the homosexual players, he believes, who would improve if there was a more tolerant attitude in football.
"Gay is the pejorative of choice of the playground and the locker room," he says. "There are plenty of players obliged to conform their behaviour to rigid ideas of masculinity for fear of being perceived as gay when they aren't."
But this surely cannot be a widespread issue.
"Are you sure? In the locker room being sexually considerate – that is, not sleeping with everything female that moves – is gay. Having non-sexual friendships with women is gay. Being nurturing and considerate is gay. Having a friend who is gay is gay. Choosing not to drink until you puke is gay. In football, even reading a broadsheet or using words with more than three syllables is gay."
So how can football change? If he does not encourage gay players to take the initiative, what then?
"Football needs to grow up, accept its failings, and change. It starts at the top: the FA has to reflect wider society. I know it threatens their existence because it means certain blazerati would have to go. But it would make them better as an organisation.
"I'm not interested in people hugging and getting along. I'm a psychologist who is interested in making institutions better. Perhaps if they realised if they did this they would win the World Cup they would do something about it."
Key moments in Amaechi's career
1. In 2000, he turned down a contract worth £11 million with LA Lakers to remain at Orlando Magic for just £380,000 a year out of loyalty to the team who had given him his break into the NBA. He was traded by Orlando a year later to Utah Jazz.
2. He came out of retirement to win a bronze medal with England at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne.
3. The announcement of his sexuality got a mixed reception. Former NBA player Tim Hardaway said: “I wouldn’t want him on my team. If you have 12 other ballplayers in your locker room that can’t concentrate because he’s there, it’s going to be hard to win.”
sourcelol um..... I liked this guy because of his statements right after he came out, but now he seems incredibly pretentious and dare I say a tad bit self-hating/homophobic?
posted by GossipGander
\\ tags: gay / lesbian / rights, sports athletes
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