The Making of Michael Sam’s Decision

When NFL prospect Michael Sam came out last summer, he did not do so in a vacuum. Likewise, we cannot discuss the topic of how the media has reacted to his decision to come out or to the question of whether or not the NFL is ready for a gay player without considering some of the precedents who paved the way for Sam’s decision to come out. From Glenn Burke in MLB to John Amaechi and Jason Collins in the NBA to the cases of Sean Avery’s gay rights support in the NHL, Chris Kluwe’s support in the NFL and Kwame Harris in the NFL, there is a surprisingly long history of media reaction to gay athletes and their supporters to compare against the reaction to Sam’s own more recent announcement.

First off, as at least one article published in the wake of Sam’s decision noted, we actually came quite close to having an openly gay athlete in a major sport over 35 years ago. We just didn’t get there because while the athlete in question, Glenn Burke of the Los Angeles Dodgers, later revealed that most of his teammates knew and didn’t care, his manager, his team’s executives and most of the media who covered the team were decidedly not ready to handle that concept. In fact, the Dodgers’ response to the open secret that was Burke’s sexuality was to try to force him to marry a woman and then, when that didn’t work, to trade him away to Oakland, which was actually far less welcoming of his sexuality.  Burke was never the same, retiring soon after at the tender age of 27, and died in 1995 of complications from AIDS. In this case, the standard media response to Burke seems to have been not to even acknowledge the story, at least within the local media covering the teams he played for.

By the time John Amaechi came out in 2007, the media attitude towards gay and lesbian people and the idea of gay and lesbian athletes had vastly improved. Instead of being hostile towards Amaechi or ignoring him, there was enough interest in what he had to say that he was able to come out on Outside the Lines, one of the most prominent programs on what was already easily the most dominant sports news outlet around, ESPN. Granted, this was in part because ESPN Books was simultaneously publishing Amaechi’s autobiography, Man in the Middle. Nevertheless, it says something that rather than deliberately ignoring the open secret of Amaechi’s sexuality the way reporters had done with Burke, ESPN was interested enough in Amaechi’s story and sympathetic enough to what he had to say to allow him to make his announcement by publishing his book and giving him an interview on one of their most prominent programs. Certainly it goes a long way towards helping to explain why Sam would allow ESPN and Outside the Lines to play such a large part in breaking his story seven years later. Even so, Amaechi’s announcement probably made less of a positive impact than it could have, partially because of Amaechi’s obscurity and the fact that he was already retired but largely because its main immediate consequence was to provoke an infamous set of homophobic comments by Tim Hardaway. True, those comments essentially ruined what was left of Hardaway’s career but the sense that his sentiments were shared by many active players in the NBA seems to have persisted, judging by how long it took the next NBA player to come out. Homophobia, whether explicit or implicit, was no longer the status quo among the media but there was still a circus-like element to the coverage, one that continued with the strange outing of Kwame Harris.

Unlike Sam, Harris didn’t get to announce his sexuality. Instead, he was arrested in January 2013 and charged with assaulting his ex-boyfriend. Authorities noted when announcing the arrest that he was a former NFL player and that was that. Eventually, he served five days in jail but instead of a sit-down interview, his news was broken by the San Mateo Daily Journal. One wonders how much more coverage this would have received if Harris had been an active player, especially since much of the negative coverage surrounding Sam’s coming out focused on the idea that his mere sexuality would be too much of a “distraction” for teams to be able to handle. The other aspect of Harris’s case relevant to discussing the media’s coverage of Michael Sam is that it again shows ESPN’s growth in treating the subject of gay athletes with sensitivity. Five months after Harris was arrested, ESPN the Magazine printed an in-depth profile of Harris and his struggles as a secretly gay player in the NFL. While it acknowledged the events that led to Harris’ arrest, it also depicted him with nuance, sympathy and complexity.

Indeed, really the only case involving gay athletes where it can be argued that ESPN totally dropped the ball is that of Jason Collins. As Deadspin pointed out on the day that Collins came out last April, in a post aptly titled “Here’s Everything ESPN Covered Before Mentioning Jason Collins”, the most powerful sports network in the country took two full hours after Sports Illustrated posted its story on Collins to address the news. Instead, they focused on such subjects as the New York Jets releasing Tim Tebow, the Los Angeles Lakers being eliminated from the playoffs in the first round and the then-upcoming 2013 NFL Draft. During an episode of Outside the Lines that same day, they then asked Chris Broussard, a journalist already on record as having religious objections to homosexuality for his opinion, leading him to call homosexuality “an open rebellion to God.” A couple weeks later, ESPN’s president, John Skipper, wound up having to apologize to reporters for letting Broussard make those comments instead of reporting on the impact Collins’ announcement was actually making on the NBA.

The irony then is that of all the notable aspects of the media coverage surrounding Michael Sam’s decision to publicly come out, the most notable thing that stands out is just how much of a reversal of the Jason Collins situation it was. Where Sports Illustrated gave Collins the platform to announce he was gay and then covered the story with sensitivity and thoughtfulness and where ESPN first neglected, then badly mishandled the story, it was ESPN that helped announce the news about Sam, gave him his platform and then respectfully covered the story. And it was Sports Illustrated that drew criticism for mishandling a story their competitors had broken and spotlighting Sam’s detractors instead.

Reading Cyd Zeigler’s account for OutSports of how Sam and his advisors prepared to announce his coming out, the thing that stands out the most is not how so many media outlets could have failed to figure out Sam’s sexual orientation but just how many people did know but were either persuaded to stay quiet until the time was right or came to that decision all on their own. Rumors had been swirling around University of Missouri and SEC message boards for months, if not years. Sam, of course had come out to his teammates at Missouri at the beginning of his senior season and the University of Missouri had recently come under scrutiny from several sports media outlets, including ESPN and Outside the Lines for its mishandling of a case where a member of the women’s swimming team was allegedly raped by at least one player on the football team, eventually leading her to commit suicide in 2011 after the university failed to support her. Given those circumstances, the news about Sam could have very easily leaked much earlier and in fact the decision to make the announcement wound up being moved up when Sam started receiving questions from NFL scouts about his sexuality at the Senior Bowl in January. In his behind-the-scenes article, Zeigler even admits that he suspects the only thing that kept most media outlets from breaking the story before Sam was ready was fear of continued blowback from Grantland’s infamously botched story on a transgender golf club inventor who committed suicide. And it turns out that Sports Illustrated did indeed figure out what was going on in the week leading up to the New York Times and ESPN jointly breaking the story. In fact, according to Zeigler, SI’s editor, Jon Wertheim called Zeigler the Friday before Sam made his announcement, told him they knew about Sam and offered to break the story himself but was persuaded not to do so. But, as Stefan Fatsis pointed out in an excellent piece Deadspin posted the following week entitled “How Sports Illustrated Botched the Michael Sam Story”, SI responded immediately to Sam’s announcement that Sunday by posting their own piece by Pete Thamel and Thayer Evans, the latter of whom had recently been heavily criticized for another botched story on corruption within the Oklahoma State football program.

The piece purported to talk to “eight NFL executives and coaches.” As Fatsis noted in his piece, they were all given “anonymity in exchange for ‘their honesty.’” They then used this anonymity, a tool which the Society of Professional Journalist’ own code of ethics suggests should not be given lightly, to imply that Sam’s draft stock would fall because of his sexuality, that his numbers were “inflated”, that “an openly gay player would ‘chemically imbalance’ a locker room because football is ‘still a man’s-man game’”, that the NFL wouldn’t be ready for a gay player for a decade or two and that Sam’s decision to publicly come out before the NFL draft combine was “not a smart move.” One source claimed that NFL executives weren’t biased against a gay player but that many players were and that a gay player would create too much of a media distraction. Similar assertions were made by the sources who talked to Peter King for a column he posted the same night, sources who were also granted anonymity, no questions asked.

But as Fatsis pointed out, the credentials for Evans and Thamel’s sources weren’t quite as impeccable as they might seem at first glance. The executives and coaches were a player personnel assistant, three scouts, an assistant coach and a former general manager. As Fatsis wrote, “That’s a bunch of second-tier personnel and coaching staffers, and one guy who isn’t in the league anymore. Not a single one of those people will make the final call on whether to draft Michael Sam, and they may not have any meaningful influence at all.” This was not noted, either in Thamel and Evans’ piece or in King’s column. By contrast, ESPN aired Sam’s interview on Outside the Lines, avoided any controversies about the story involving any of their on-air personalities and continued to provide balanced in-depth reporting. Writers for ESPN-owned Grantland and ESPN.com have noted that Sam will likely not be drafted on the first day but so have other outlets and most of them have taken the time to point out that this would have been the case regardless of Sam’s sexual orientation.

So do I know whether or not the NFL will accept Sam? I can’t claim to know for sure, though let’s be honest; neither did any of the executives who talked to Thamel and Evans. It won’t be uniformly positive that’s for sure. The amount of players who publicly had negative reactions to Sam coming out wasn’t nearly as large as some had predicted but there were a few, including New York Giants cornerback Terrell Thomas, who told the New York Post that the NFL wasn’t ready for a gay player and expressed fear and annoyance at the idea of having to go through sensitivity training to deal with a gay teammate. But as Sarah Sprague noted for the website Kissing Suzy Kolber, Thomas has ties to a church that offers “recovery help” to men for “same sex attraction” so I wouldn’t go so far as to say that he stands for most NFL players or even most religious NFL players.

Much of the reaction from most other current and former players like Zak DeOssie and seems to have been extremely positive. And even players who offered more measured responses, including Ryan Clark and DeAngelo Williams, suggested that Sam’s sexuality wouldn’t be the most important aspect of how he was accepted in the NFL. As Williams tweeted, “I could care less about a man’s sexual preference! I care about winning games and being respectful in the locker room!” And frankly, if players like Riley Cooper, Ray Lewis and Donte Stallworth can eventually be accepted in the locker room despite the “distractions” they bring with them, because of what they bring to the field, so, I believe, can Michael Sam.