About 16 months ago we brought the story of Zach Puchtel, a former Univ. of Minnesota basketball player who came out of the closet during a fashion show in the spring of 2007. Since then, he’s been hard to pin down on various levels: His sexuality is fluid and he says he’s not gay; He has moved around a few times; And his career focus has seemed to shift from NFL player to writer and now to basketball player again. Puchtel is now in Israel playing professional basketball, where his name is listed as Zach Fuchtal.
Zach is a fantastically interesting guy. I’ve gotten to chat with him on the phone and correspond via email a bit. He makes no apology about being hard to categorize: He relishes in it. Take this blog post, for example:
For years, I wanted to be a rockstar, but not sincerely. It was more of a “geez, that’d be awesome to do lots of drugs, have sex with tons of women/men, travel the world, drive cars into pools, and never answer to anyone” type of dream. For a lot of people, this is “living the dream”.
How many pro basketball players would say that? “Have sex with tons of women/men?” Very few.
His latest few blog posts talk about a coming change in his life. I’ll be interested to see what the next change holds for him.
Hat tip to Gay.com.
on Jan 11th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
The change in the pronunciation of his name is likely not a dodge, but a problem with his name in Hebrew. In that language, there is one letter used for both the hard “p” sound and “f” sound. Unfortunately, which it sounds like is dependent on where it is in a word or syllable. It’s the same letter that starts words like “Pharoh” which means that at the beginning of words, it is always the soft “f” sound. So when his name is on a jersey, Israelis will pronounce it “Fuchtal” and that is likely why all media references for him from the team, even those translated to English, use the Hebrew pronunciation.
According to an Israeli website, however, the name is still being spelled in English as Puchtal. Actually, the Hebrew side of the site is hurting my head. According to it, he’s being called Fuchtal, with the American pronunciation of the “ch” rather than the Hebrew or German, yet the initial letter is still being pronounced with the “f” sound rather than “p.” It boggles the mind how thoroughly Israelis can butcher English.
http://www.cadursal.co.il/index.php/b19sYW5nPWVuJm9fc2Vhcz0xOCZvX2xlYWc9MSZmdXNlYWN0aW9uPXBsYXllcnMubWFpbiZ0PTExNCZwPTEwNzk=
on Jan 15th, 2009 at 12:21 am
I wish he would speak up about what is going on in Gaza.