So you’re not gay, are you?
Feb 28, 2013, 12:43 PM | Updated: 3:13 pm
(AP Photo/Dave Martin)
Mike Florio, a reporter for Pro Football Talk says it’s called “the proverbial elephant in the room.”
But at the NFL Scouting Combine this week, coaches and general managers were allegedly openly asking football players if they were gay during interviews.
“I don’t think anyone knows how to solve this dilemma yet. And it’s just that they want to know what they’re getting. They want to know what issues they may be dealing with down the road,” Florio told radio host Dan Patrick.
KIRO Radio’s Andrew Walsh said that just a few days after Florio’s comments came the story of University of Colorado tight end Nick Kasa, who had been at the combine. While he doesn’t have the curious story that say, a catfished Manti Te’o has, he was asked none the less.
“They ask you, ‘Do you have girlfriends? Are you married? Do you like girls? Those kinds of things? It was just kind of weird. But they would ask you with a straight face. It’s a pretty weird experience altogether,” Kasa told CJ and Kreckman of ESPN Radio Denver.
The radio hosts then giggled as they asked Kasa if he was gay.
Kasa isn’t.
“I don’t think they’re comfortable with the idea of being gay,” said Andrew referring to the hosts’ giggles as the “bro-down community laughter.”
There is an uncomfortableness in our culture, said Andrew, and he believes the NFL will be one of the last places in our culture where that feeling will change.
“As time goes on, that nervous laughter, those awkward conversations are going to go by the wayside,” said Andrew.
Following the combine, the NFL released a statement to teams that said their questions about a players sexuality were, in Andrew’s words, “not cool guys.”
The NFL does have to prepare itself for openly gay players, said Andrew, and they need to be proactive about it.