[For this year’s annual Super Bowl series, I wanted to focus on some football figures & communities. Leading up to a special weekend tribute to some of our best current public scholarly SportsStudiers!]
On a
striking and significant change, and why there still needs to be more.
I thought
I had written in this space at some point about Michael Sam, the defensive lineman
who in 2014 became the first openly gay player drafted by an NFL team when the
(then) St. Louis Rams selected him in the
7th round of the draft. I’m not finding such a prior post, but I
can certainly say that I thought a lot at that time about Sam and his journey and
challenges, all of which continued across a fraught and ultimately unsuccessful
first year in the NFL, an even more challenging time with the Montreal
Alouettes of the Canadian Football League, and a long hiatus from professional
football for
mental health reasons. (Apparently he’s now back in the game with the
Barcelona Dragons of the European League of Football, serving as both
a player and a coach for the team, which was nice to learn while researching
this post.) While Sam’s struggles to make it in professional football are
certainly due in part to football-related
issues, there’s no doubt that those mental health reasons were largely due
to this groundbreaking personal journey—and I can’t help but believe that that
journey, and more exactly the backlash
and prejudice he faced during it, made it more difficult for him to do the
necessary football things to make and stay on the Rams or any NFL team.
All of
which makes the current
and ongoing story of NFL defensive lineman Carl Nassib that much more
striking and inspiring. The two players’ personal and football journeys have at
least one significant difference: selected by the Cleveland Browns in the 3rd
round of the 2016 draft, Nassib had thus already been in the league for five full (and
quite successful) seasons when, as part of the June 2021 Pride Month
celebrations, he
came out as gay on his Instagram account. Yet nonetheless, I believe that both
the far more positive (or at least much less overtly negative and hateful, but
I would stress the genuinely
supportive notes so many players have struck) responses to Nassib’s coming
out and the ways in which he has been able to continue his NFL career (and even
move to a new team) with seemingly no issues reflect a striking change over
this last decade. That’s a change in part in football culture, one no doubt influenced
by Sam. And of course it’s also a change in American culture and society more
broadly, one illustrated not only by the kinds of pop culture shifts I wrote
about in this post, but also by these drastically different receptions to
two openly gay NFL players within a period of just a few years.
That’s a
very good thing—but as with any social progress, it’s far from the end of the
story. Recent
polling and studies indicate that something like 7% of Americans identify
as LGBTQ; there are 1696 active players in the NFL at any given team (53 active
players on each of the 32 teams), which if the percentage holds would mean that
somewhere around 118 of those players would be gay or bisexual. I’m willing to
grant that the culture of football (at every level it’s played) might dissuade
many LGBTQ young men from becoming or staying part of it; but even so, it seems
quite difficult to believe that there is only one gay player among the league’s
current 1700. And the same is certainly the case with all the other major sports
leagues, which as of this writing—and with the very definite exception of the
WNBA, which features many
LGBTQ players—have precisely one
openly gay player each. As that last hyperlinked article notes, one is more
than zero, so the change reflected by Nassib has been wider and is worth
celebrating—but there’s plenty further to go, and I look forward to the time
when a professional athlete coming out is entirely un-newsworthy.
Special
tribute post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Football figures or communities you’d highlight?
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