So what guys, Michael Sam is gay. But that does not matter, this is football that we are talking about, not an episode of the Bachelor. Being gay has never been something that has raised a question regarding performance in sports and with Michael Sam there will be no difference.
That is what I wish I could say. But I cannot.
This is a big deal, this is historic and this is an opportunity for the NFL and one of its teams to make a statement that it has moved beyond a culture of discriminating against someone for anything more than their skill set. As we look back this is a concept that has reigned strong as every single barrier to someone's reaching their dream fell and is not one simply confined to barriers regarding homosexuality.
On a mid-August Washington DC afternoon, a man named Martin Luther King took to a little wooden podium bent on conveying one concise message. On that day that was one whose air was cleansed by King's words of liberation we were given words that will forever go down as ones to be applied not only to civil rights fights but to every instance of human oppression for years to come.
Contained within his description of the most famous dream in American history, King said that he dreamed that one day his children "would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
In the few days since Sam announced that he is gay we have seen an outpouring of support from the NFL's players and coaches.
“Should I really care?” an unidentified NFL GM said. “Is it going to be that big a deal? Aren’t we beyond this?”
“It’s not a shocking thing to me, and it won’t be to our organization,” another GM said. “You’ll have old-school guys on your team saying, ‘Are you kidding, putting this guy on our team?’ And you’ll have other guys say, ‘Who cares? I knew two gay guys who came out in college.’ ”
Fact is, thought it sounds harsh and cutting to an outsider people not caring, not freaking out like this is some kind of heroic story to be compared to someone overcoming a broken leg or terrible illness remains a kind of acceptance and recognition of what Sam's sexual orientation is: something that we shouldn't even be talking about as a news story. It is just who he is.
But there is talk about it being "weird" or "abnormal", a flip side to the acceptance of those first two GM's quoted here.
“We talked about it this week,” a third GM said. “First of all, we don’t think he’s a very good player. The reality is he’s an overrated football player in our estimation. Second: He’s going to have expectations about where he should be drafted, and I think he’ll be disappointed. He’s not going to get drafted where he thinks he should. The question you will ask yourself, knowing your team, is, ‘How will drafting him affect your locker room?’ And I am sorry to say where we are at this point in time, I think it’s going to affect most locker rooms. A lot of guys will be uncomfortable. Ten years from now, fine. But today, I think being openly gay is a factor in the locker room.”
What that GM does not see is the "SEC Defensive Player of the Year" recognition next to Michael Sam's name. What that GM does not see is the historic season Sam put up in 2013 leading the SEC in sacks and tackles for loss. The statistics alone would and should go far enough to label him a well suited winner of that Defensive Player of the Year Recognition.
And to the, players not being comfortable with having a gay guy in their locker room, part of that GM's quote, I have two things to say. Number one: that is not Michael Sam nor that GM's problem, that is the problem of the teammate of Sam's who has a problem with it. Number two: he said that in 10 years it may not be a problem. Well "it" has already been proven as not a problem by the fact that never in all the years of professional sports have we seen an instance of a player who has eventually come out as gay cause any sort of problem within a lockeroom.
Additionally, might I point out the highly inappropriate comments and struggles regarding Richie Incognito and Johnathan Martin earlier this season and how much of a locker room disturbance that DID cause. I don't know about you but I think examples like that prove that we have bigger problems in sports than something so childish as a player showering next to one teammate but not another.
But as we have been shown already in this article, no matter how inclusive this society has become in some rights, no matter how much of the nation is currently included under the swath of where same sex marriage is legal, there remains ignorant people who are stuck in a kind of discriminatory belief that should have died with the Jim Crow laws of the 1960's.
“Unfortunately,” a scout said “this is a lot more okay in society than it is in lots of locker rooms. Some locker rooms are still stuck in the ’50s.”
For Michael Sam, what he has done is an act included in a realm beyond that which the term brave presides over. He is a hero and to the gay community a man who if drafted will have to blaze a path through a proverbial forest of oppression as thick and rooted in time as one of the redwood forests of the American southwest.
But none of this should have to be this way.
Loving someone has nothing to do with football and it never has. Yet as Michael Sam comes out, people act like it does.
Finally I close things out with one final message.
Newsflash, Tom Brady likes women. Oh...you knew that? Well then, I rest my case. Being gay is not a disease, not something that can tear a locker room apart and while it may be treated like it is, it is no more of a news story than that regarding the sexual orientation of Tom Brady, Peyton Manning or Vince Wilfork.
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