From Michael Sam to Carl Nassib
After seven years, gay rights becomes an issue in sports again. Why now?
In the middle of a chaotic off-field sports summer, from the COVID Olympics to the confusion over name-image-likeness, attention has twice shifted, unexpectedly, to gay rights.
The first moment came when former Penn State star and current Las Vegas Raiders defensive lineman Carl Nassib became the first NFL player on an active roster to announce that he is gay. Then, just this week, Nashville Predators prospect Luke Prokop broke another barrier, becoming the first active NHL player under contract to come out.
I wrote about why Nassib’s announcement was a big deal in a piece for The Conversation back in June. In simplest terms, the reason is Nassib’s announcement smashed a massive wall in men’s team sports and in the hypermasculine world of pro football, in particular. Per Outsports, the leading LGBTQ sports website, Nassib was just the 16th NFL player to come out at any time in his life -- and again, the only one to do so when he was still in the league and on a team.
When I got feedback on my story, the most frequent questions I got were about the last time a football player coming out made big news, and that player was Michael Sam, who did so in 2014. What changed? Why was 2021 different?
Before I get to the answers, let’s quickly run through Sam’s story.
As he finished up at Missouri following the 2013 season, Sam was the co-defensive player of the year in the Southeastern Conference. You can watch him terrorizing quarterbacks here. He had also come out that season to his teammates, who reportedly kept his sexual orientation a secret, though conversations I have had with journalists and football industry people make me doubt it was a closely guarded one.
Per research I did for The Conversation story, 12 players have been selected as the SEC defensive player of the year since 2010. Of those players, 11 were selected in the first round of the NFL draft and one in the second round. The median selection was ninth overall. In short, the SEC defensive player of the year is a standout, and should be a lock as an NFL draft pick.
Not Sam. Heading into 2014, Sam was projected as a fourth-round draft pick. Then he publicly declared in interviews that he was gay in February of that year and tumbled on the draft boards, sliding to a sixth-round projection.
Ultimately, he was not selected until the 249th pick overall – eighth to last – in the final round of the draft. Sam kissed his boyfriend live on television when he got the news, to a decidedly mixed response.
He never played a regular-season down in the NFL.
And nobody else playing in the four major American male team sports -- the NFL, MLB, the NBA or NHL -- came out again until this summer. So again, why? What changed? And why were the Raiders and the NFL so welcoming to Nassib?
My first response is that, at the end of the day, it comes down to an individual choice. Nassib obviously wanted to come out. It made him feel better, as it does for the many LGBTQ people every year who do the same. As a straight man, it’s a little hard for me to imagine the feeling, but as a teenager I saw my beloved and dearly departed sister go through that struggle during the 1970s and ‘80s in our intensely Catholic family. It’s difficult.
There are larger cultural reasons at play as well. The reality is that the American public became much more accepting of homosexuality in the first two decades of this century, per the respected Pew Research Center. By 2015, a conservative-leaning Supreme Court ruled there is a constitutional right to gay marriage.
Outsports has documented the steady increase of openly gay and lesbian players, coaches and others in the sports world in several ways, most recently in its quadrennial count of LGBTQ Summer Olympic athletes. Just in the last five years, the number has more than doubled, to over 160.
Beyond just the sheer weight of numbers and a societal shift, it’s my opinion that player empowerment -- in other words, what has grown out of the Colin Kaepernick racial injustice protests in 2016 -- has also had an impact on other areas of sport.
To me, the pivotal moment came just last year, when some of the NFL’s biggest stars, including Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes, made a Black Lives Matter video. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell responded by acknowledging the contribution of black players, and the league -- which, to say it is careful about branding is a monstrous understatement -- agreed to take steps to send social justice messages at games. Once that happened, it seems to me, the league could not possibly fail to support a veteran who has played in 73 games over five years as he acknowledged his constitutional right to his own sexuality.
Finally, I have been asked whether race played into what happened to Sam versus the support Nassib received. Sam is Black, while Nassib is white. The simple answer is I don’t know. I don’t have any evidence that league executives wanted Sam to go undrafted or to be cut. In fact, two big names in sports journalism, Peter King and Stephen A. Smith, reported shortly after the Rams waived Sam that a league official made calls to other teams trying to get him at least a practice squad spot (the Cowboys signed him).
However, I will say that, if you have read about the history of Black athletes in the United States, from Jack Johnson to Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali to Kaepernick, the race question is a reasonable one to ask. And my knowledge of Sam’s experiences is not comprehensive. What I can say is, perhaps changing attitudes toward sexual orientation in America, the tumult of the last seven years in our country, and individual choices, all combined to make the journey from Michael Sam to Carl Nassib a complex one.