TNT Basketball Commentator Charles Barkley Stand Against Homophobia
Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images
TNT basketball commentator Charles Barkley took a stand against homophobia
in sports this week.
On the following piece by Scott Stinson, Mr. Stinson portrays Charles Barkley as a gambler. Barkley can attest to that.
Mr. Stinson points out that Barkley is taking a gambler's position now on taking a stand against homophobia and that Barkley has at times taken opposite positions on the same issue. Also true. But what I would like to point out and the reason for posting this piece at adamfoxie* is that Mr. Barkley did not have to take this position. This is not a position you take after lifting you finger up to the wind and feeling which way it's blowing. I wish for the day that such a thing would become truth, but so far today it is not so.
As for a person to take Barkley's position on Gay players and homophobic players is because he most feel that is the right thing to do. As a black man, as a man in sports and as a human being he most feel is the best thing for all three I just mentioned.
I appreciate you reading this post and is up to you to let me know wether you agree with me or not.
Adam Gonzalez
Let us take a moment to appreciate the greatness of Charles Barkley.
Not for his skills on the basketball court, although he was plenty great at that: an 11-time all-star and 6-foot-6 rebounding champ.
And not for his talent as a basketball analyst, a role in which he has delivered probably the greatest collection of lines since someone dreamed up the idea of pinning a microphone on a former athlete’s lapel. To wit, on student-athletes: “All I know is, as long as I led the Southeastern Conference in scoring, my grades would be fine.”
Let us salute Barkley’s famous outspokenness — “I can be bought. If they paid me enough, I’d work for the Klan,” he once said — which took him to a new place this week, when he became easily the most famous athlete to say he has no problem at all with homosexuality in the context of a pro sports team.
In an interview on a Washington radio station, he said he was certain he had gay teammates over his Hall-of-Fame career — and insisted he didn’t care.
He went further still, arguing that the long-held belief that professional sports is the last bastion of homophobia — or maybe it’s tied wth hip-hop music on that score — is an unfair myth perpetuated by the media.
“It annoys me that they try to act like all us jocks are going to be homophobic,” he said on a podcast with ESPN’s Bill Simmons. “It does a disservice to team sports to say we would not like a gay guy … and that guys wouldn’t want to play with him. It doesn’t work like that in sports.”
“Dude, we just want guys on our team who can play,” he said later. “On team sports, we don’t care what colour or religion a guy is, as long as he can play. … You know who I don’t want to play with? Guys who suck at their sport.”
Barkley’s comments come in what was a remarkable week for the issue of homosexuality in sports. Rick Welts, the president and CEO of the Phoenix Suns, came out as gay to The New York Times on Sunday. Will Sheridan, a player on the Villanova Wildcats from 2004-07, came out as well to ESPN — and said his teammates were aware of his sexuality and accepting of it. Both men said they hoped their decision to go public would make things easier for gay men to be accepted in the sports world — where only a handful of athletes have ever come out, and only when their playing careers were over. It seems, after a week like this, that we are edging closer to the moment when a closeted athlete comes out, and in so doing topples one of final walls of societal intolerance. But are we?
Welts and Sheridan both say they were not confronted with bigotry when they came out. Welts’ boss, Suns owner Robert Sarver, called it “pretty much a non-event.” Sheridan says his Villanova teammates — at a Catholic university — never bothered to tell their coach. And Barkley says if he knew a teammate was gay “we never said a bad word about the guy.”
Still, a prominent athlete has not yet identified himself publicly as gay, and even if Barkley is right about teammates shrugging their shoulders and moving on, the public would not. It would unquestionably, for some time at least, become a thing. Sheridan, whose Villanova team went to the NCAA tournament three times in his playing days, told ESPN that he knew if he came out publicly, it would become the story of his team.
“I knew it would be a big deal and I always felt like I was part of something bigger,” he said. “This wasn’t about me being gay. It was about our team trying to do something together. I didn’t think it was appropriate.”
He’s right; it would be a big deal. The problem is trying to guess how big a deal it would be. And for how long?
For a closeted athlete who is considering coming out, Welts said, “They don’t have anybody who’s gone before them to know how that will actually play out. So more than anything it’s the fear of the unknown, of not knowing.”
This is the impossible calculus, then: even as athletes from Steve Nash to Sean Avery record public-service messages promoting tolerance, and men like Welts decide to, as he said, “engender conversation about the topic” in sports, it will take an athlete willing to out themselves mid-career to know what will happen when they do. Maybe it will take a young player who is good enough to know that the desire for his talents will win out over discrimination against his sexuality. Maybe it will be an older player, with a legacy established and a final contract already signed.
Until then, it remains a barrier that no athlete has tried to leap.
Welts, for one, does not share Barkley’s view of the male sports world, telling the AP that it’s “definitely not in step today with where society’s thinking is on the whole topic.”
Barkley says otherwise.
“America is homophobic. America has always discriminated against gay people,” he told the Simmons podcast. “They try to pass the buck and make it like all the jocks are going to be offended if a guy comes out.”
And so Barkley, a compulsive gambler who once admitted to losing US$2.5-million on blackjack in six hours, has put a big wager on the tolerance of his fellow athletes.
I hope he’s right.
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