The gossip column hit the newsstands while most of the New York team was
sleeping off a cross-country flight to Philadelphia.
There was "a persistent rumor around town,"
The New York Post reported, "that one Mets star who spends a lot of
time with pretty models in clubs is actually gay and has started to think
about declaring his sexual orientation."
By noon, the story was all over New York sports talk
radio, which linked it to Mike Piazza. Some stations went so far as to cite
a long-running rumor that Piazza had a relationship with a local male TV
personality.
The national media picked up the story, and a crowd
of reporters awaited Piazza before the Mets' next game at Veterans Stadium.
The reporters jockeyed for position during batting practice, straining to
hear Piazza's pronouncement over the music blaring from loudspeakers
bouncing off the concrete walls of the otherwise empty stadium.
"So Mike," a reporter asked, "are you
gay?"
Piazza and the throng laughed nervously.
"I'm not gay," he said. "I'm
heterosexual. That's pretty much it. That's pretty much all I can say."
The next day a picture of Piazza with two Playboy
Playmates shared the cover of the New York Daily News with an exclusive that
one of the 9/11 terrorist pilots had cased the World Trade Center before the
attacks, and with an FBI warning that the Brooklyn Bridge and Statue of
Liberty could be targets.
Sports, the last bastion
The U.S. Supreme Court recently overturned a Texas
sodomy law that said homosexual sex was illegal even in the privacy of one's
home. This summer Canada decided to change its laws to allow same-sex
marriages. "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" is the latest of
several gay-themed television shows to break into a prime-time network
lineup. Closer to home, San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis is the
first openly gay DA in the nation.
While homosexuality remains a controversial issue, it
is one that is more out in the open than ever. Except in professional team
sports.
"This is the last taboo in sports," said
Dr. Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in
Sport at the University of Central Florida, which studies attitudes about
race and gender.
Gay athletes such as tennis' Martina Navratilova and
Billie Jean King and figure skater Rudy Galindo have been successful in
individual sports, and several former athletes such as diver Greg Louganis
and Padres outfielder Billy Bean have come out since retiring. But the
attitude is different for current male athletes in major team sports.
"Because team sports remain the focus for
masculinity in this culture, for some people the idea that the embodiment of
toughness or masculinity could be gay remains extremely interesting,"
said Brendan Lemon, editor of Out magazine, a gay publication.
Said New York Times contributing columnist Robert
Lipsyte, who has written extensively on the issue: "This may be the
most powerful story among males because it goes right to the heart of what
we consider men to be."
More than 43,000 athletes have played in the four
major professional team sports in America – major league baseball, the
NFL, NBA and NHL – and not one has been openly gay while playing. Five men
have come out publicly after retiring.
A 1994 University of Chicago survey showed that about
3 percent of American men identified themselves as gay.
Few deny there are gays on pro sports teams.
"I don't know them personally," said Esera
Tuaolo, a nine-year NFL veteran who announced his homosexuality in October,
two years after retiring. "But I know I'm not the only one."
Said former NFL running back Dave Kopay, the first
American team sport athlete to come out after retiring: "I thought
there would be more at this stage in the game. I spoke out in 1975; that's a
lifetime ago."
Not on our team
Tuaolo said he kept his sexuality secret because he
feared he no longer would be accepted by teammates, to say nothing of
opposing players and their fans.
He would introduce his partner, Mitchell, in various
ways when the two were in public. One day Mitchell would be his
brother-in-law, the next day the manager of Tuaolo's music career.
The charade slowed once Tuaolo retired and was no
longer in the spotlight. But on a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon with
Mitchell's parents last year, strangers recognized the former football
player.
"We went back to that routine," Tuaolo
said. "They'd ask me about my (adopted) children, and Mitchell couldn't
say anything. I'd be talking about them and look at Mitchell, and he wanted
to cry. I wanted to cry."
Tuaolo decided to go public with his sexuality. He
has little doubt what would have happened had he come out while playing.
"I would have been cut, hurt, chopped,"
Tuaolo said. "Someone might have gone high-low, where someone hits your
knees and another goes up top."
Former teammate Sterling Sharpe told HBO's "Real
Sports" that Tuaolo "would have been eaten alive and he would have
been hated for it. Had he come out on a Monday, with Wednesday, Thursday,
Friday practices, he'd have never gotten to the other team."
Chargers defensive end Marcellus Wiley said he could
foresee players not accepting a gay teammate.
"I don't care if he's gay – I just hope he's
good," Wiley said. "I understand some people might not be as
open-minded. Now at some point, the gay player is going to meet some
resistance."
That's what happened to Huntington Beach High
cross-country coach Eric "Gumby" Anderson. When he came out in
1993, fewer students joined the team, and some runners already on the team
were taunted by classmates. Anderson said a 250-pound football player beat
up one of his runners in part because his coach was gay.
Athletes might feel uncomfortable with gays because
they have little social contact outside the time-consuming sports world,
said sports psychologist Richard Lustberg.
"Guys spend so much time working on their game
to get to a certain level to play professionally, so they might not be as
well-rounded as you would think," he said.
Further, the dynamics of team sports discourage
individuality. A gay athlete coming out would be – among other things –
a huge distraction.
"Sports that require interaction and
coordination of effort promote higher rates of homogeneity," said
Anderson, who researches the issue of gays in sports and teaches at UC
Irvine. "The more interaction that's required between members of a
team, the less variance they want those members to exhibit on all kinds of
scales.
"Sports that require less or no coordination of
effort require heterogeneity. White, black, tall, short – just run your
race, I'll run mine. You can therefore predict that there's more homophobia
in the major team sports."
Bean, a reserve outfielder for the Padres from
1993-95, also hid his homosexuality partly because he was afraid his
teammates would reject him.
"In male team sports you have no control over
who you play with," he said. "You can't change people. Out of 25,
10 might be amazing human beings. And then you might have three or four you
wouldn't put your worst enemy near. I just think people need to understand
how intense it is being in such proximity with multimillionaires who are
very egotistical."
Is it worth it?
Bean was never a millionaire, and felt there was
little chance he would become one if he told his teammates he was gay. He'd
either be demoted or become such a distraction that he would become a
liability.
"Historically, for athletes, people wonder why
it hasn't happened," Bean said. "You know why? They're smart. They
know that their job is to be successful. Any agent is going to look at it
from the business end. It's about the ability to play comfortable and focus
and concentrate."
Wade Boggs' admission of an extramarital affair with
a woman named Margo Adams resulted in endless taunting by fans – and made
Bean sure of the reaction he'd receive.
"I'm out there playing against Wade Boggs
thinking, 'Can you imagine if they knew I was gay? Can you imagine what I'd
be going through?' " Bean said. "And I'm throwing my .228 average
up there on the scoreboard. You don't need to be punched in the face too
many times before you know it hurts."
Lemon, the Out magazine editor who created a stir
with a 2001 column claiming he was dating a major leaguer, said players are
reluctant to bet their livelihood on the tolerance of teammates.
"If you perceive one of the sacrifices you have
to make is being concealing about your sexuality," he said,
"that's a choice most people have made, in a way now more than ever,
because the money's bigger. You're probably going to think twice before you
potentially jeopardize that by coming out of the closet."
Additionally, many athletes' incomes are
supplemented, in some cases substantially, by endorsement contracts.
"Athlete marketing is image-making, pure and
simple," said Noah Liberman, a writer for Street & Smith's Sports
Business Journal. "And corporate America would find it hard to create
an image for a gay athlete that will appeal broadly to the consumer public.
"Gay athletes generally don't get past square
one, as our standards for heroes are too narrow and unsophisticated to
accept them. But heroes have been narrowly defined since the beginning of
time. Heroes aren't nuanced, and homosexuality is still a really big nuance
in our culture."
There is a business market for a gay athlete, but
it's too small to forsake the major markets.
Said Lemon: "They don't want to go from selling
Nike on Fox to selling Nike in the pages of Out magazine."
The hunt is on?
Last February, another New York Post column suggested
that a former baseball player who was the subject of a recent biography was
gay. Sandy Koufax, who was the topic of a book released in 2002, thought the
Post implied he was gay. The Hall of Famer broke ties with the Dodgers, the
only team he played for, because team owner Rupert Murdoch also owned the
Post.
Then there was the turmoil created by the Piazza
rumor.
"If (Piazza) hadn't held the press conference,
there would have been nowhere to go with that story – it was a blind item
in a gossip column," Lipsyte said. "What's always interesting is
that these stories flare and they absolutely die. It's like a car wreck –
everybody runs to see it. As soon as they see the blood leaking out, they
run away."
The fact that Piazza and Koufax responded viscerally
to stories about their sexuality speaks to the media's power and the
sensitive nature of such allegations. Both took drastic actions to quell
rumors that never named them specifically.
"The world would be ready for it if we didn't
start the witch hunt," said Dave Pallone, a former major league umpire
who came out after retirement and travels the country speaking about the
issue. "The witch hunt is what makes it all be what it is."
Bean thinks the media would exploit a gay athlete.
"It's 100 percent the media," he said.
"It'd be the lead topic on every news show for 10 days. They're
desiring information outside the lines to keep the media machine moving. Any
player who is ready to come out, he has to understand that that's something
he's inviting into his life, if he wants to do that.
"I really think the media would make somebody's
life almost impossible."
Network television was unsure how Americans would
react to gay storylines until shows such as "Ellen" and "Will
& Grace" showcased the issue. Gay politicians didn't know how
they'd be accepted until they came out to constituents.
"Since there are no out athletes, there's no one
to go to for perspective," said Jim Buzinski, editor of Outsports.com,
a Web site for gay sports fans. "There's no group screaming, 'I'm being
discriminated against!' "
If and when an active male pro athlete in a major
team sport does come out, America will start to discuss the issue of gays in
sports. And for some, that's the point.
"This is a story," said Bill Konigsberg, a
gay man who has written and edited for ESPN, "and has to be seen as a
story until we're at that point where we say that this doesn't matter
anymore and that nobody cares because we're all the same."
