Amaechi's small step for gay sportsmen
John Amaechi's voice came resolutely down the phone line from New York. Clearly, he hasn't suffered from second thoughts. He is not the first gay man in professional American sports to come out, but he is one of the first, and the sensation in the past week has been huge, controversial and shocking. "My whole world exploded in five minutes.
Man in the middle: John Amaechi is challenging sporting stereotypes
"There were constant phone calls, constant newspaper articles. It was completely insane." In a way, it was gratifying. Homosexuality in professional sport had become an issue, as he wanted, and the debate in the United States has been furious. That is because it is a turf war. Right on one side, might on the other. Tolerance and respect on one side, deep-seated, turbo-charged, testosterone-fuelled bias on the other. The Englishman, who played basketball for the Utah Jazz 2001-2003, is not just an average former NBA player anymore, now he is a civil-rights activist.
With his book Man in the Middle, published in America this week, he is airing a subject that has been stuffed deep to back of the locker in the pro-sports dressing room for years. For do not for one minute think he is alone.
"It's an absolute nonsense to think that. I don't know if it's a sizable minority. I really don't know that. But this I do know. It's important to know that there are players out there in soccer, in American football, in baseball, in all the sports, that people love, admire, embrace and hero-worship who are gay. That is just a fact. And I include Britain in that statement.
"It would be lovely to think that in Britain where there is a different level of tolerance than exists in America that these players could come out and suffer no kind of backlash. But that is looking at the issue with rose-coloured spectacles. I don't think the FA would have an initiative to ban homophobic behaviour at football grounds if that were the case. Black players wouldn't be abused and suffer monkey chants if that were the case. If you came out as gay, you would be abused to death by the ignorant and the obtuse.
"That is one of the reasons I didn't come out and write my book until after I'd finished playing. It's understandable that people do not think that is brave of me, but in my view it was the appropriate and proper thing to do. It demonstrates a naivety and lack of empathy to think I could have done it as an active player. Pro sports are a business. They're about winning. Anything that leads to a distraction from that winning is a negative. All the things I have experienced in the last week would have been multiplied many times had I still been playing in the NBA."
The things he has experienced cross a huge range, from staunch liberal support to hellfire and damnation. One former team-mate, Troy Hudson, said this: "The majority of people in pro sports - I mean, in the world - don't feel comfortable with that kind of person around.
"Especially in a masculine sports where they're always touching each other and in the showers."
Another former team-mate from the Houston Rockets, Tracy Grady, took the opposite perspective. "I'm the type of dude who don't give a ****. You could be the most flaming guy on earth and kiss your boyfriend after games as long as you don't try it with me. I just want to win. Everything else is just a bunch of crap."
Amaechi understands, if not applauds, both reactions. "The chemistry in the locker room of an elite team is delicate. In America, there are a massive number of people who would claim some kind of religious backing for their response. Then there's just the 'yuk factor'."
There is also, if we are brutally honest, a sense in which some big strong men who play sports would feel their personal sexual safety invaded if a gay man also inhabited their locker room.
"Oh dear, the narcissism and arrogance of that view," said Amaechi. "Heterosexual men do not love all women. This is such a stereotypical view that there is such a thing as a gay predator that will hit on anything that moves. And then you add that I'm black which also had a predator stereotype attached. And that I'm 22 stone and 6ft 9in but it's absolutely ridiculous.
"There is an image of a gay man being amazingly promiscuous.
''It's absurd really. As I said in my book, everybody else in the NBA had far more sex than I ever did. We have such double standards. Society thinks a man having sex with many and varied women is a reaffirmation of his virility, but for a man to have a long-term intimate relationship with another man, some people see that as disgusting."
Yet in America they are talking about the possibility of a woman president in the 21st century, they are talking about a black president. A gay president? Amaechi just laughed. So did the San Francisco Chronicle, a hollow laugh, at the thought of pro sports seeing the error of its covert homophobic ways.
Revisit:
Amaechi to come out publicly
Since February 4, 2006