(ThyBlackMan.com) Is the NBA ready for an openly gay player? NBA Owner Mark Cuban thinks so.
The prospect of a head female coach and openly gay players in the NBA may have at once seemed as unlikely as the African-American president who now resides in the White House.
But the times, they are a changin’.
Billionaire NBA Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is known to be opinionated and outspoken. In a recent interview with TMZ Live he discussed the prospects of a female coach in the NBA and expressed confidence that not only would the NBA embrace a woman coach, but openly gay players as well.
Mark Cuban said NBA players want to win, so if they had confidence in a female coach “they would go to war with her.”
The topic arose after discussing Tennessee women’s basketball coach Pat Summitt, who has more wins than any other coach in the history of college basketball.
“I think within the next three to five years, absolutely,” Mark Cuban opined. “There’ll be guys who come out of the closet and continue to play in the NBA and be accepted.” He added, it will be “more of a media 
sensation when somebody comes out than it will be a player issue.”
Mark Cuban’s comments seem slightly naïve given the hyper-masculine environment inherent in pro-sports in general, and the NBA in particular, which just over the last year has experienced unfortunate instances of anti-gay slurs being used by players. Kobe Bryant’s aggressive verbal attack and subsequent $100K fine, after calling a referee a “f**king fa**ot”, received negative press nationwide, and brought much needed attention to the issue of bullying in schools and sports.
But Mark Cuban’s confidence is encouraging. “I don’t think there’s really the perspective that we are intolerant. I think the only issues we’ve had is with some fallback and some old-school-type language that’s derogatory to gays. So there are certain words that were accepted five to ten years ago that guys are starting to recognize you can’t use any longer. And that hasn’t been a problem.”
Until now, pro-sports stars have only ever come out after retirement. And the NBA lags even there. Three NFL players have come out as gay post-retirement: David Kopay, of the San Francisco 49ers and Washington Redskins; Roy Simmons of the New York Giants and star defensive lineman Esera Tuaolo of Minnesota’s Vikings. Major League Baseball Players Glenn Burke and Billy Bean also came out after leaving the league, but this was decades ago.
As for the NBA? Just one. John Amaechi, who played for the Cleveland Cavaliers, later for Orlando Magic and who turned down a $17 million offer to play for the LA Lakers, is the sole former player to come out.
Amaechi explained his journey in a bestselling book, Man in the Middle in which he describes the difficulties of being gay in the NBA.
In a 2002 interview given to UK newspaper, Scotland on Sunday, Amaechi said “That there’s no openly gay players is no real surprise. It would be like an alien dropping down from space. There’d be fear, then panic: they just wouldn’t know how to handle it.”
But that’s how he felt before he came out. The reception he received in 2007 surprised even him, and he was forced to admit he had “underestimated America”.
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