Finally, a gay male athlete comes out and he is ...

There has been much anticipation in the press that Real Soon Now an active major team sport jock would finally come out of the closet. But I've noticed that there has been an automatic assumption that he would turn out to be a good player -- you know, like, Tom Brady would announce that he had been living a lie, just going through the motions with Bridget Moynahan and Giselle Bundchen. 

But, what, I wondered, if the gay comer-outer turned out to be lousy? That's not exactly unprecedented. For example, when I was young, I was a big fan of the L.A. Dodgers during their pennant years of 1977-78. They had lots of fine ballplayers -- Sutton, Garvey, Cey, Lopes, Russell, Reggie Smith, Dusty Baker, and so forth -- and a terrible player, Glenn Burke. Well, eventually, Burke was traded to Oakland and then they cut him and then he came out of the closet and then died of AIDS. 

Ever since, you read about how he was a victim of prejudice, that that's what halted his baseball career. No, what hurt Burke's career was that he was no good. He was an outfielder/ first basemen who, at his peak in age 25 in 94 games hit .233 with 1 homer and 16 rbis. My recollection of Burke from listening to a lot of Dodger games on the radio was: "rally killer." For his career from age 23 to 26 his Wins Above Replacement number was -2.4. In other words, some random Triple A player would have been less deleterious to the Dodgers, but they kept giving him a chance to prove himself because he was fast and looked strong. (My vague impression is that Burke was assumed to be gay by Dodger management.)

The Collins Twins: Compare the facial
expressions. Which one looks gay?

So, today, NBA player Jason Collins announced to vast fanfare that he was gay. He is a 34-year-old seven-footer who, along with his 6'11" twin brother Jarron Collins, has been well-publicized since the 1990s, first at Harvard-Westlake (where actor Jason Segel was his back-up), then during four years at Stanford, where he finally developed into an effective Division I player as a senior, then as a #18 pick in the first round of the NBA draft. (I've often written about the Collins twins since I'm interested in twins for what they can teach us about human biodiversity. As I noted in Taki's three years ago, the Collins twins, like the NBA Lopez twins, are publicly agnostic on whether they are identical or fraternal twins.)

The Collins twins are a West Coast version of all those hated Duke basketball players from stable middle class backgrounds who stick around college for four years and learn to play team basketball, then go on to unimpressive NBA careers because they aren't super athletes. Personally, I like the Duke/Stanford model of recruiting athletes who aren't complete thugs and aren't totally out of place at an academic institution, but I'm in a minority.

As befits their middle class backgrounds and zillion dollar educations, the Collins twins are articulate. For example, when retired NBA player John Amaechi came out of the closet in 2007, amid much celebration of his bravery, I quoted Jarron pointing out:

"[Teammate Jarron] Collins' memory, though, is that Amaechi wasn't just indifferent toward his job, but irritated by it and the pro sports atmosphere. "He just wasn't interested in basketball, period," Collins said. "I never knew someone who just disliked the game. I would say that everyone has different motivations to play the game of basketball. John was very clear that money was his. But it really was like, he didn't like the game. It's kind of hard if you hate it." 

Amaechi was an example of how much some gay men don't like sports, even if they are being paid millions to play a sport. Amaechi was a 6'10" and 270 pound project from England who never developed because he despised practicing basketball as something that kept him away from visiting art galleries and his other interests, none of which had anything to do with sports.

I pointed out during the brief Amaechi whoop-tee-doo that the most likely gay male contact sport players would be guys who were given the rare genetic gifts to play whether or not they were obsessed with competitive sports, such as very tall basketball players. (In contrast, small, ferocious, over-achieving star athletes are unlikely to be gay. For example, I'm guessing that Wes Welker isn't gay. Let's see if he's married. Oh, indeed he is ... Mrs. Welker was formerly Miss Hooters.)

And what do you know? The next example of a team sport athlete coming out of the closet turns out to be another NBA big man.

My impression is that Jason Collins isn't a complete fraud like Amaechi was, that Collins is a conscientious professional athlete who worked hard at defense. Despite his height, he was never a shot blocker, but I believe he had good fundamentals on defense.

But he's still terrible at this stage in his career.

Jason's coming out of the closet is being given a big whoop-tee-do on the grounds that he is the first active male major team sport player to do so. But, "active" sounds like a stretch. In his just concluded season with two teams at age 34, he played only 384 minutes out of a possible 3936 or more.

Basketball-Reference has a handy "Per 36 minutes" section that projects out how well he would have done if he'd been allowed to play full time (and had not gotten tired or fouled out). Collins' 2012-13 per 36 minute stats are some of the worst I've ever seen. If he'd played 36 minutes per game, the seven-footer would have averaged 3.8 points per game, 5.6 rebounds, 0.7 assists, 0.9 blocks, and 8.0 personal fouls. His field goal percentage was .310!

Nate Silver, who isn't exactly unbiased, writes in the New York Times:

In some ways, that makes Mr. Collins’s decision to come out much braver. He would hardly have been guaranteed a job next year, regardless of his sexual orientation. If N.B.A. teams discriminate against him at all for being gay, that could keep him on the sidelines.

More skeptically, perhaps Jason Collins is trying to pressure the NBA into giving him one more year just to prove they aren't homophobic? Or this announcement could be calculated to help him do well on the public appearance circuit in his onrushing retirement. He can now look forward to several years of being paid to accept awards for his "bravery." Maybe this will get him a shot at a TV gig.

But, Jason, even before he got old, has never been very good (and 6'-11" Jarron, who has been out of the league for two years, was worse). A few weeks ago, commenter jody wrote:

when i was younger i didn't get this at first, and chuckled along when [ESPN] clowned players like [shawn] bradley. then after a while, i started to get it, and noticed they never ridiculed the goofy, clumsy, or just plain bad black players with nearly as much verve or ardor. and there are a lot of them. they screw up all the time too or have terrible careers. and the sports guys simply ignore it most of the time. 

i remember during some of bradley's later seasons, there were these twins in the league, jason collins and jarron collins, who were pure crap. yet they were 25 minute a game starters at center, and not one time ever were they clowned by ESPN or any sports writers. these two guys turned in a few seasons where they were playing 30 minutes a game and scoring 4 points or something ridiculous, the way erick dampier was for a couple years.

And that was back in their 20s when Jason and Jarron were young. Jason is old and extremely bad now, but being mediocre at his brief peak, then decrepit for years, and gay hasn't kept him from collecting $32,816,349 in salary over his career.

A sidelight is that this raises the question of concordance in terms of sexual identity among identical twins. (We don't know that the Collins' are identical, but that's the way to guess.) Jason writes in Sports Illustrated:

The first relative I came out to was my aunt Teri, a superior court judge in San Francisco. Her reaction surprised me. "I've known you were gay for years," she said....

It was around this time that I began noticing subtle differences between Jarron and me. Our twinness was no longer synchronized. I couldn't identify with his attraction to girls. ... 

I didn't come out to my brother until last summer. His reaction to my breakfast revelation was radically different from Aunt Teri's. He was downright astounded. He never suspected. So much for twin telepathy.

Northwestern U. psychologist J. Michael Bailey has done two studies of sexual orientation concordance among male identical twins. The first came up with an estimate of 50%, but Bailey became uncomfortable with the possibility that his figure was biased from how he'd recruited participants. So, he did another one using the national twin registry in Australia, and came up with, I believe, a figure of only around 22%. That is well above the single digit percentage you'd find if both nature and nurture among identical twins raised together had no effect and sexual orientation was completely random, but it's still strikingly low, meaning the causes of male homosexuality remain scientifically murky.

By the way, a half-dozen years ago I put up a post about Where are all the famous gay oldtime baseball players? After all, there is a vast literature devoted to the history of baseball, and yet few examples of old timers who turned out to be gay. A number of commenters wrote in to point out that everybody knows that a certain well-known hitter who is not quite a Hall of Famer (but was really good) is gay. This bon vivant was a media favorite during his long baseball career for his manners, charm, and superb taste in fine dining. In other words, he was an exemplar of some stereotypically gay virtues. But, he was not subject to many gay rumors, however, because most of the gay rumors are started by gays as sex fantasies, and this ballplayer was always a little on the plump side.

P.S., a commenter points out that Jason Collins still scores a zero on my Google Gaydar system of using Google's search prompts to see if anybody had been searching to see if he was gay. (Granted there are several Jason Collins out there, but the first prompt was NBA so he's the most prominent.) He's the kind of nice young gay man who doesn't loom large in gay fantasies.

By the way, I was recently cited as an authority on the TV show Red Eye by guest Gavin McInnes as the authority on the lack of gays among male golfers. Gavin slightly overstated my findings in saying there are "no" gay male golfers, but it is clear that in golf gay men are as rare, both at the professional and at the enthusiastic hobbyist level, as lesbians are common. As I pointed out in "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay" way back in 1994:

In roughly half the traits, homosexuals tend to more resemble the opposite sex than they do the rest of their own sex. For example, many heterosexual men and lesbian women are enthusiasts for golf, as well as other hit-a-ball-with-a-stick games like softball and pool. Lesbian-feminist sportswriter Mariah Burton Nelson recently estimated, not implausibly, that 30% of the Ladies Professional Golf Association women touring pros were lesbians. While such estimates are hard to verify, it's clear that the marketers at the LPGA desperately wish they had more mothers-of-three like Nancy Lopez, the most popular woman golfer ever: i.e., a victorious yet still feminine champion with whom other heterosexual women enjoy identifying. 

In contrast, pre-menopausal straight women and gay men typically find golf pointless. For example, despite incessant socialization toward golf, only one out of nine wives of PGA touring pros plays golf herself! And gay male golf fanatics are so rare that it's difficult to even come up with an exception that proves this rule (which might explain why golfers wear those god-awful pants).

Among famous gay male entertainers who are enthusiastic golfers, the only name that comes to mind is Johnny Mathis.

On the other hand, other country club sports, such as tennis (Bill Tilden and Hitler's favorite Baron Gottfried von Cramm) and diving (Greg Louganis), have gay male legends. I would hardly be surprised if the gay percentage in men's golf isn't at least as high as in baseball, but it's still low.

In summary, the weight of evidence illuminates much about the natures of masculinity and femininity, which are rather things to understand.