It is a new day. Polls find far greater acceptance. And there will always be a coach or someone to voice a different opinion. This is what sells papers. If you do not have someone giving a different opinion you don’t have a story. And look at our current day reality. If someone who is a celebrity takes a unpopular view of an issue they are quickly shut down. Being anti gay is no longer acceptable. You want to stand out like a fool, take an anti-gay position about an individual person.

I have worked for a minor league baseball team for 14 years. I have seen the change in attitude during this time. You can privately ask a player now if they believe there is a gay person on the team and they often times will tell you yes. It is a locker room secret that is really no big deal. And it is only a secret because the view is that it is up to the player to come out. This is why I say I have seen the change and we are living in this fear of ‘What will the neighbors think.’

Most sports are about the team. And each player plays a part of making the team whole. Yes, another player might try to use someone’s sexuality against them during the game by calling said player a faggot. You don’t think other things are said to piss players off that have nothing to do with sexuality but are said to get the player to lose focus? This is the nature of agressive men in agressive sports. They bait each other about the players wives or mother or something to make the player lose focus. And sure someone will call the player a faggot. So what! If calling you a name is going to make you less able to preform then the issue isn’t about your sexuality it about how you handle things.

When someone comes out it will be a story for a couple of days and then there will be another story that will takes its place. We got to stop thinking that the whole world is going to shut down because a player is gay. The world has moved on. Man up.

i thought it was hilarious when ESPN2′s Cold Pizza (or first down or whatever it is now) used to pair him up w/ fellow DLer Kordell Stewart to discuss the NFL. i wonder if they ever ran into each other at the same truck stop on their way home from the studio….

The only way to have a relationship and remain closeted would be to keep it totally contained to private homes – your own and maybe the homes of a very trustworthy friends. I can’t imagine the kind of strain that would put on any relationship, and I can’t believe it would be good for the player’s performance. After all, Billy Bean noted in his memoir that he left baseball in large part because he wanted a relationship and wouldn’t go through the strain of a closeted one again, following the death of his first partner. The level of stress in his closeted relationship would be exponentially increased now.

So the choice really seems relationship/coming out vs. no relationship at all, and I really wonder how today’s players, coaches and fans would react. I have to believe the coaches (and front office personnel) and fans would have the harder time of it; players are generally young enough to have grown up in a much more accepting atmosphere. How many pro athletes, I wonder, have gay siblings, uncle, cousins, friends from high school or college? Not only would it tend to make them more accepting personally, but they would also be more likely to squash blatant homophobia in the locker room or among the team.

I don’t think for a second that there would be universal acceptance among the players, but I think the level would be high enough to eliminate many of the problems that would have existed just a few years ago. Tuolo also talked about worrying he would be deliberately hurt on the field if he were found out, I really think that would be far less likely to occur.

You have already said they hang out in open view with their lovers. I’m not sure how posting their names constitutes outing.

Thought to ponder… why do so many Athletes choose the Atlanta area to have a home ? Including Terrell Owens and Ben Rothsberger.

Then again Mike Bibby was in Target Atlantic Station this afternoon and literally the only people paying attention to him were wondering how is that person talking so loud on his cell so people would notice him

There will always be some crackpot but you go to any game and someone is saying something about your mother. Remember the old saying ‘your momma wears army boots.’ I don’t think fans are going to be that supportive of fans yelling things that are offensive and all teams have fan behavior clauses.

This is really going to be old new very soon. The gay community is going to rally around the player. The players team is going to rally around the player. The news organizations are going to make the person a celebrity and say how brave the person is. And FOX news will find some stupid player on some other team to say how they don’t want to play with a gay player and this player will be treated as the idiot that he is.

People have changed. Times have changed. It really isn’t a big deal any more. How many of our straight friends have gay family members. Time to move on.