The Tim Hardaway comments are likely to continue to stir debate in gay and mainstream media for some time.
Something that’s not been brought into current coverage, however, has been a Sports Illustrated study from 2006 that asked a sample of professional sports players: “Would you welcome a gay teammate?” The somewhat surprising finding released a year ago was that “yes” was the response from a majority of NBA basketball pros, NFL footballers, NHL hockey players and Major League Baseball players polled.
Broken down by specific sports, NFL players were the lowest percentage of “yes” responses at 56.9 percent, but still a clear majority of the survey sample. The NBA and Major League Baseball players were slightly higher at, 59.6 percent and 61.5 percent, respectively.
The NHL players surveyed were far and above more accepting at 79.9 percent affirmative responses.
As Jim Buzinski notes in his outsports.com story almost a year ago, many of the NHL players “are from Canada and Northern Europe, where gay marriage is allowed or where homosexuals have equal rights. The percentages for the three U.S.-based pro sports leagues are all close enough as to be statistically equivalent.”
In a more recent story on the site, Cyd Zeigler provides comments from male pro sports figures who seem to back the 2006 survey, including this insightful quote from Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.
"From a marketing perspective, if you’re a player who happens to be gay and you want to be incredibly rich, then you should come out, because it would be the best thing that ever happened to you from a marketing and an endorsement perspective. … On the flip side, if you’re the idiot who condemns somebody because they’re gay, then you’re going to be ostracized, you’re going to be picketed and you’re going to ruin whatever marketing endorsements you have."
In the past decade, we’ve heard from several pro sports players who came out of the closet after retirement. At more than a year since Sheryl Swoopes came out while still on the roster in professional women’s basketball, how long until the world of big-league men’s professional sports experiences its first pre-retirement “out” player?
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