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Years ago
Parish: NBA Not Ready For Gay Athlete (RealGM)
Maybe an interesting topic from RealGM:
Boston Herald - The very mention of how Sheryl Swoopes and her groundbreaking announcement might apply to the NBA jerked Paul Pierce into abrupt laughter yesterday.
What if, like the WNBA's reigning Most Valuable Player, an NBA athlete not necessarily a star announced that he was gay?
The Celtics captain couldn't picture such a player.
"I probably wouldn't want to guard him," Pierce said, seemingly only half joking. Which is precisely what Pierce and others claim an outwardly gay NBA player would have to absorb a lot of tough jokes and tawdry humor.
"It's a lot different in the WNBA," Pierce said. "A lot of the girls there are (gay) anyway. I didn't know that (Swoopes) was gay, but I'm not really surprised. I've seen a few of them out together, and you just know.
"But professional basketball would be tough for a guy. You're talking about only 12 guys in the locker room. It's personal. It would be tough out in public, too. Our faces are seen more than baseball, where they have a hat, or football with helmets."
Swoopes, a divorced mother of one, certainly put a public face on her own league last week in making her announcement. The three-time Olympic gold medalist made the announcement in advance of a new endorsement for a cruise line that caters to lesbians.
Doc Rivers agreed that Swoopes probably has a significant base of support within her own league. Though the Celtics coach admitted that a gay NBA player would be isolated, Rivers also expressed hope that today's athlete is enlightened enough to accept a gay teammate.
That said, Rivers added that the player would need a thick skin and a willingness to absorb what is guaranteed to sprout from locker room culture.
"The jabs wouldn't stop," Rivers said. "And the guy would have to take it. He'd have to understand that it wasn't personal. The great thing about team sports are the ways these guys can get on each other in the locker room and on the bus rides, and it's brutal. These guys leave no rocks unturned, and the great thing about it is that the guy who's the target laughs along with it.
"If a guy came out and said he was gay, for a day no one would say anything, but then right after that they would kill him. And it would be in a team way. That's all that I hope would happen."
Robert Parish isn't so sure. The Celtics Hall of Famer, who recently joined the team's community relations department, said he would fear for a gay player, even if he would applaud such an announcement.
"Pro sports are all about macho, having that chip on your shoulder from all that testosterone flowing through the locker room," Parish said. "Nothing's taboo in a pro locker room, except family members. Everything else is free game. It's a male chauvinist environment at its highest. A player like that could even suffer some bodily harm if he wasn't careful.
"I'm afraid we've got a long ways to go. I know I won't see a change in my lifetime. Maybe my children's lifetime, though."
Parish's acceptance of gay culture may be connected to his NBA roots. He started playing in San Francisco for the Warriors in 1976. After spending his life in rural Louisiana, the Bay Area's denizens were, as Parish said, "eye opening oh my goodness, umm umm umm.
"I had never seen anything like that," he said. "It made me pause. But I never was appalled. The only thing that shocked me was that it was going on in public. I had never seen such a blatant display."
"No time soon," Parish said. "It would be a very, very uncomfortable environment to step forward in. It would probably make someone retire, because they couldn't take the heat. Men in general are more homophobic. Society is more accepting of woman-on-woman sex than man-on-man. Women on women? That's a man's fantasy right there."
