Brendon Ayanbadejo: Four NFL players considering coming out as gay

No. Played his last MLB game in 1979. Publicly came out in a 1982 article, ironically, in Inside Sports.

He wrote in his autobiography, however, that he figured most of his teammates knew. Supposedly, Al Campanis offered to pay for the honeymoon if Burke would get married to a woman.

Also, with Dusty Baker, invented the high five.

 

It would be kind of fitting if the first gay NFL player to come out was a Bear.

 

The media will embarrass itself with how this is handled... That's a guarantee.

The coaches of the players in question will be asked about it on every single opposing team conference call... A coach will get sick of answering the same queston for the 12th week in a row and that will lead to someone writing, "Coach X sick of questions about gay player."

Every player in the locker room will be asked, "Do you have a problem with Player X? Do you mind showering next to Player X. Do you ever catch Player X looking at the other players? Should Player X be allowed to use this locker room? Is Player X an abomination of almighty God?"

Then, if any of the teams in question struggle that season, someone will be asked if said player coming out was a distraction, and a player saying, "We could have done without the media circus that came with it." will be interpreted as "Player X blames gay player for disappointing season."

It will be disgraceful and it will happen.

 

There's a difference between teammates knowing and the public knowing. I'm guessing that the bulk of the players who would come out would not shock most of their teammates.

 

Then I hope one of them is a Browns player so they can blame their suckitude on something other than general suckitude.

 

That's exactly what I was thinking.

 

I'm not sure about that, Mizzou. Last year, Matt Birk was outspoken against gay marriage and was in the same locker room as Ayanbadejo. Outside of Baltimore you heard very little about that, and even in Baltimore it did not become a huge issue.

I think it would be something like what a lot of athletes do when something comes up (illness, relative's death, arrest, whatever) and they say, OK, I'm going to talk about it this once and then I'm going to be done talking about it.

 

I hope for the nation's sanity that it is anyone but Tebow.

 

I don't think ESPN has learned anything from last year's Tebow debacle.

I think if you made the announcement at the end of the postseason workouts so there would be a good 6-8 weeks before players report, that the stories might only hang around for a week or two, but I think you would see them resurface once the season started, especially as soon as the coaches start with their weekly conference calls with the media that covers the opposing team.

 

I can't imagine Tebow, given his background, would ever come out even if he was gay.