Michael Sam and breaking down barriers

Michael Sam

Jackie Robinson made his debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947 and baseball was changed forever, no longer would black athletes be excluded from the majors based solely on their race. However we didn't see all teams integrate until 1959 when the Boston Red Sox promoted Pumpsie Green. However the NFL did not fully integrate until 1962 when the Washington Redskins were threatened with eviction if they did not integrate. Its gets very tough for homosexuality because its hard to discriminate against someone when you do not know who is and who is not, Michael Sam is not going to be the first gay NFL player he is just going to be the first openly gay NFL player. There are 1,696 players on active NFL rosters at any one time and that's not counting players who are on the practice squad, injured reserve and the numerous number of players who bounce around the league and some of them are gay, same with all other sports. Michael Sam is from Texas and until 2003 Texas, as well as 12 other states, had anti-sodomy laws that either prohibited persons of the same sex in engaging in anal or oral sex. So until Michael Sam was 13 it was illegal in the state he lived in to be gay and its still illegal for him to get married in his home state as well as many others.
There are some who believe that Sam should have stayed in the closet, that its his business and they don't want to know about it, other doing the whole "I wouldn't have a problem with it but somebody else would" line which is just utter and complete crap. One anonymous NFL executive stated
"In the coming decade or two, it's going to be acceptable, but at this point in time it's still a man's-man game. To call somebody a [gay slur] is still so commonplace. It'd chemically imbalance an NFL locker room and meeting room."

People have used the try in a decade or two argument before and its again complete crap, should baseball have given it another decade or two to integrate or should the civil rights movement waited another twenty years to fight for equality, no and neither should Sam; will this be an issue for some players sure, but a team will get over it you know why? Because they are a team of 53 different players all of whom have different opinions and somehow they manage to work together despite these differences because its for the team. As I said before there are already gay players in the NFL and with some of them their teammates already know and the team has been able to move on. The idea that Michael Sam is not a man's-man is probably the stupidest part of that statement, Michael Sam is going to play in the NFL and in his last season at one of the best College football teams in the best College football conference he has 11.5 sacks and 19 tackles for a loss and was named the Defensive player of the year in addition to being an all American and he is not a man's man?
The use of slurs in the locker room is an interesting one as most people are not privy to what NFL locker room's are like but if somebody is going to try and call Michael Sam a Fag then I think he will respond as well as if someone would call him any number of racial slurs, the use of those terms used to be commonplace but now its to the point where most white people have to actually describe the word by calling it the N-word rather than use the term itself. Maybe its time for the men in those locker room's to rethink how they use a term that directly insults their teammate and you know what, they will. Open interaction leads people to question preconceived notions; people often believe that gay men are more feminine and gay women are more masculine but here we are with a man who completely destroys that stereotype and more importantly has been and will continue to completely destroy that notion on national television. We already have Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender  people  openly in the military for 3 years now and the military has not completely fallen apart or become any less tough since this occurred. The NFL wont be any less of a sport because Michael Sam is in it and maybe this can lead some people to question some of their preconceived notions about the LGBT community. Dismissing Sam as an 'off field distraction' is true only because we as a society have made it into one, Robinson was an 'off field distraction' and yet somehow everyone got over it, breaking down barriers is something that not everyone is comfortable with, that's why you have to Break them down. Not everyone is going to be okay with this change and while it is not socially acceptable to publicly homophobic or racist some people will continue to do everything they can to stop Sam from having a successful NFL career.
Many NFL players have already expressed support for Sam, but the real challenge come now because somebody is going to have to draft him and many teams do not want to for reasons varying from homophobia to homophobia. Some people had the audacity to try and claim that Sam did this now to help boost his draft stock, which is just stupid and is just another way people are trying to justify their beleif that he should have continued to lie and stayed in the closet. Sam is a player who should absolutely be in the NFL but some teams are going to find ways to diminish him so that they can justify not drafting him or at least they draft him late enough that they do not have to justify why they cut him. Deadspin talked about how some of these executives are going to spend the next few months until the draft trying to lower his draft stock as much as possible and they very well might succeed, we wont know until the draft. If you are interested here is a scouting report from October that talks about Sam and another from November that calls him one of the five best pass rushers in the draft. What I would really like to see is after Sam is drafted that other players feel that they too can come out and be open about who they are, if a team is upset because they feel its a distraction then they can get over it because they certainly have for players driving drunk, assaulting women, killing dogs, weird fake girlfriend story and any number of other off field distraction. Its exactly what former player Donte' Stallworth said that if an NFL team cannot handle Michael Sam then 'team is already a loser on the field'. This step by Sam is a big one for the NFL and for sports in the United States but its still just a step and its a long road that we are all traveling on. This is also going to need to be one of those times where the media steps up and calls out the people who try to mask their homophobia by talking about 'distractions' and call it for what it is homophobia under the guise of whats best for the team just like what Jackie Robinson went through before breaking that barrier down.