Sure, Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s colour barrier in 1947, becoming the first black player in Major League Baseball (MLB) well before the burgeoning days of the Civil Rights Movement. Fritz Pollard and Bobby Marshall were among the first black professional football players in 1920, which is a pretty amazing feat if you think about it. Still, Robinson and the others were subject to racial threats and abuse throughout their careers, from players and fans alike, and many teams stayed all white for many years after.

Racial minorities were slowly phased into every sport and every team when owners realized they couldn’t pass up the profits their talent provided. As Robinson’s manager, Leo Durocher, once said, “I do not care if the guy is yellow or black… I’m the manager of this team, and I say he plays. What’s more, I say he can make us all rich.”

And so, with some resistance, the racial barrier was eventually broken down on all teams, and racial minorities gained acceptance in every sport (although, there are still many issues involving race in most sports today).

There is one barrier, though, that has yet to be crossed, and that is the fact that there are no openly queer athletes in any of the major North American professional leagues. What’s more, there never has been. There have been players who have come out after they’ve retired, such as the NBA’s John Amaechi; the NFL’s Esera Tuaolo, Roy Simmons and Dave Kopay; and the MLB’s Glenn Burke and Billy Bean. But there has never been an active player who is openly queer to the public and teammates alike.

Perhaps the most indicative narrative of the struggle for gay athletes is Glenn Burke’s story. Burke was a highly touted outfielder who joined the MLB in 1976. He was openly queer to his teammates, and the management of his team knew that he was queer. Almost immediately upon his arrival, he was met with opposition for this aspect of his identity. His manager tried to get him to marry a woman before his rookie year, offering a contract bonus. Burke refused and continued to be out to his teammates and management. Within two years, he was traded to another team, and he was out of the league a year later. He claimed, “prejudice drove [him] out of baseball.”

What comes next then? Has the sports community evolved enough for an active player to come out as queer? There are many roadblocks in place. There would be the constant slurs coming from the opposing fans, or even the hometown fans, if the athlete’s performance suffered. It would become a huge media story and garner a level of attention with which many would find it difficult to cope.

And maybe most troubling would be the reaction of fellow players or coaches.

After Amaechi came out, another former NBA player, Tim Hardaway, said that he “wouldn’t want him on my team… If [Amaechi] was on my team I would really distance myself from him because I don’t think that’s right, and I don’t think he should be in the locker room when we’re in the locker room.” Hardaway later apologized for the sentiment, but his visceral reaction is one that many athletes have and one that many queer athletes probably fear. Your teammates are supposed to be the ones who look after you, protect you, support you – no matter what. If a player was to come out, they have to wonder: will their teammates still be there?

It is certainly a good sign for queer athletes that the NHL has partnered with the You Can Play organization to promote LGBT rights. The organization was started in part by Patrick Burke, whose father is the general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Burke’s brother, Brendan, was a hockey player at Miami University in Ohio. In 2009, he came out to his teammates, and this announcement was leaked to the media. The hockey world at large supported Burke and his sexuality, and he became an queer advocate, looking to make the sports culture less homophobic and more accepting. Sadly, he died in a car crash in 2010. Patrick Burke came up with the program to honor Brendan’s legacy.

The basic idea of the You Can Play program is right in its name. Their motto is, “If you can play, you can play.” Any athlete playing the game should be respected regardless of their sexual orientation. The program calls for queer athletes and straight allies to create a culture of acceptance within sports, using the game as a binding force rather than a restrictive one. They want to use the universality of sports to create bonds between people that go beyond sexual preference. Players are to be judged on their athletic “skills, work ethic, and competitive spirit” above all else, according to the You Can Play website. While there is still a long way to go, this development of this organization is clearly a positive step.

Players on all thirty teams of the NHL have joined the project, filming public service announcements for the group in which they pledge their support for queerathletes. The NHL is the first sport to join the effort, with the hope that the other major sports will join the program soon.

So, when can we expect our first openly gay athlete? It’s impossible to put a timeline on something so monumental, but we can hope that programs like You Can Play and the continued advocacy by queer rights groups will hasten the process.

There’s a whole generation of players rising through the high school and college ranks in a culture that is growing more and more accepting of the rights of queer people. Sooner or later, something has to give. It certainly will be a huge victory for queer athletes if they can break down the resistant and super masculine culture of the locker room.

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Our heroes do not go gracefully into their twilights. The collection of strains and injuries that one player can acquire over a whole career can grind away at the body and make life after sports physically difficult. There are football players today with mangled fingers from crunching battles in the trenches, or formery able-bodied athletes who now have trouble walking without a limp. Some players  regret not retiring earlier because they are unable to play with their children. Basketball players must deal with their balky knees that are worn from years of jumping The list goes on and on.

For every athlete, there are also the long-term effects of concussions. Research has shown that even athletes who are never diagnosed with a concussion often suffer from a series of minor bruises to the brain, which can lead to long-term damage.  Players that did not compete during our current era of concussion awareness are afflicted with splitting headaches, dementia, or even Alzheimers.

For many athletes, the dream of going pro and playing in the big leagues has gotten in the way of getting an education. Someone whose sports career has been cut short by injury, or by not being quite good enough, is often left without enough money to live on and must scramble to find a new career despite not having many other marketable skills.

Yes, for the superstars – the most talented or famous of the bunch – life is good after retirement. But there are far more players that face a hugely different reality after their sports careers.

It would be nice to think that the leagues – the ones for which these athletes sacrificed everything  – would give back to the players in retirement  and make sure that their lives are as comfortable as possible, especially for those in dire need. But the leagues have mostly let their athletes down. The different leagues’ pension plans and post-retirement medical benefits do not match the level of sacrifice that the players have given.

Take the NFL, for instance. This is the league in which players’ careers are usually the shortest and most filled with injury. The NFL has a pension plan for retired players, but it only begins once they turn 55, many years after most players end their careers. Even then, it is based on years of service and doesn’t amount to much. Darrell Green, who played for the NFL for twenty years, now receives $70,000 per year, or $290 per month per year of service (a total of $5,800 per month). In addition, the NFL  often does not hand out disability payments to athletes with medical problems. This forced one player, Mike Webster, who was overwhelmed with rising medical costs, into homelessness. He was an offensive lineman. Sporting News named him the 75th best player in the NFL of all time in 1999. He suffered from amnesia, dementia, and depression. In his autopsy, the doctors discovered that he had Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). This condition has gained much media attention in the past few years, bringing about an awareness of the dangers of concussions. For a game that is so inherently violent, this kind of callous disregard for retired players is hard to fathom. The retired players of the NFL have attempted a lawsuit against the league, asking for better benefits and pay, but the case is slow moving.

This is the sad plight of most retired athletes: once they have stopped being moneymakers for the league, they are tossed aside.  With the increased corporatization of sports, the game has become more and more of a business, and the players have increasingly become commodities. They are a means to an end. Once they stop being useful, the league sees no reason to keep supporting them, and  many professional athletes are left out in the cold.

Sure, the teams will bring them back for an alumni day, honor them every once in a while, but this sort of celebration looks past  athletes as humans and once again commodifies them. After that glimpse of support, the retiree will be put back into the dark, forced to struggle alone against their mental, physical, and financial problems.

There are some that make it through and leverage their former careers into a sustainable job elsewhere. Some are able to provide for themselves and their families and to mend their aching bodies. But there are many others – players we won’t hear about – who struggle. They go through their old age fitfully and in pain, waiting for help that will not come. Was all that strain worth it, then?

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Long story short, it’s fun to hate other teams. If your favorite team doesn’t win, well, there’s still some solace to be had when your least favorite team loses.

A part of this hate is the creation of a nameless, faceless mass: the “other team’s fan.” You apply a stereotype to those fans of the other team, and use it to fuel your glee when they lose.

White Sox fans believe Cubs fans don’t actually care about the baseball, and that they just want to get drunk to forget that their team hasn’t won a World Series for over 100 years. For Cubs fans, White Sox are fair-weather fans.

Similar stereotypes extend throughout the whole country in all sports. New York fans are obnoxious to the rest of the country. Canadians turn their noses up at Southern fans, believing that they don’t really know anything about hockey. Miami fans would rather be at the beach. Boston fans have a fatalist, woe-is-us attitude when they lose, and are insufferable when they win. On and on it goes, until nearly every fan base has been reduced to one, easy-to-target person. This is how we make a recognizable “Other” of the enemy.

But why? Certainly some of it has to do with primal notions of superiority, a feeling that our team is better than yours, or, at least, that we’re more committed fans. Perhaps more importantly, all sports fans know how bad it feels when their favourite team loses. We have all been crushed by an overtime loss or playoff disaster, and we relish the fact that the opposition is sometimes suffering too. The stereotypes are necessary for this. Without them we might feel empathy for the other team (gasp!), the one we swore we hated with every fiber of our being.

Once you start to know fans of other teams, who are committed fans that love sports as much as you do, the joy is sapped. These people become humans in your eyes, and maybe even become your friends. And as much as we joke around with our friends, make fun of them, or try to rub things in their face, it’s rare that you ever want to see your friend hurt. That’s just basic human empathy. A good enough friend should, and does, transcend sports.

If you want to continue hating other teams and delighting in their failures, you can’t really make deep friendships with anyone besides people with similar allegiances. So what happens? If you know one fan of another team, know that they are as involved with the ups and downs with their favorite team, it becomes impossible not to know that there are thousands more out there. The illusion of the stereotype fades away. It’s become harder for me to celebrate when another team loses. You can still hate the team, the players, and managers, but you pass a point where it’s hard to hate the fans. There are lapses, possibly some exceptions, but you still can’t shake that nagging feeling of empathy, especially when I know there is someone like me who has had that losing feeling entering their chest or hung their head in sadness. Maybe sports and rivalries aren’t meant to contain any humanity – just pure, cold feelings of supremacy – but I can’t help it anymore.

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But there’s another aspect of these lockouts that’s even more troubling, which lies in the subtext beneath talks of revenue streams, percentages, and salary caps. These lockouts were about control, about a group of owners trying to curb a group of players in order to make sure they knew who was more powerful. Since the players, many who are of colour, have become more powerful and upwardly mobile, this battle has dredged up some uncomfortable racial tensions.  Money was a big part of the lockout, but control of the league was the ugly undertones behind every negotiation.

Let’s start with the NBA lockout – the one  which  forced the league to cancel two months of the season and left many arena workers temporarily unemployed. The basis of the owner’s lockout was driven by a desire to change the league’s financial system – one that was leading many teams in the league towards insolvency. The owners decided that the main issue was how much money the players were receiving under the collective bargaining agreement they had signed years earlier, wherein the players were slated to receive 57 per cent of the profits.

In addition to this, the NBA owners sought to keep the power of the major players in check – who angered the owners by forcing themselves onto bigger market teams at the expense of nearly bankrupt small market teams. The 2010-11 season saw LeBron James abandon small market Cleveland for big market Miami, leaving Cleveland arguably bereft of talent. Deron Williams and Carmelo Anthony also forced their teams, the Jazz and Nuggets, respectively, to trade them to bigger markets. Anthony, in particular, forced his trade to the New York Knicks by essentially telling his owners that he would leave in free agency after the season, no matter what contract they offered. He also wouldn’t agree to sign with any team but the Knicks, such that no other team would try and trade for him. By doing so, Anthony leveraged his star power and forced the Nuggets to trade him, engineering his own move to a bigger market. In the ugliest terms, this was a battle between a group of mostly black players who found themselves gaining increasing amounts of power at what the mostly white owners and commissioner saw as at their own expense.

Negotiations became very contentious, and comparisons occasionally came up that compared NBA players to slaves and the team owners to slave owners. Bryant Gumbel, a notable black sports commentator, summed it up by saying that commissioner David Stern’s efforts in negotiations have been “typical of a commissioner who has always seemed eager to be viewed as some kind of modern plantation overseer, treating NBA men as if they were his boys. It’s part of Stern’s M.O…His moves were intended to do little more than show how he’s the one keeping the hired hands in place.” So, yes, money and a financial restructuring of the system were among the goals of the NBA lockout. The owners wanted more revenue from the league profits for themselves and to curb runaway spending. But, the part that everyone knew was there but was rarely spoken of, was the issue of control.

The NFL lockout didn’t escape comparisons of slave relationships either. Star running back Adrian Peterson came out saying that the lockout and the NFL owner’s efforts to make more money from total league revenue as “modern-day slavery,” adding, “People kind of laugh at that, but there are people working at regular jobs who get treated the same way… The owners are trying to…bring in more money. I understand that; these are business-minded people. Of course this is what they are going to want to do… But as players, we have to stand our ground and say, ‘Hey – without us, there’s no football.’”

The NFL lockout was predicated on the idea that the owners deserved a bigger piece of the pie than the players –  or at least more than they were getting under the previous collective bargaining agreement. Because the NFL had become the most profitable sports league in United States, and the owners claimed that they needed more money in order to stay solvent; but, of course, they were hesitant to show their own financial documents to the players association.  They also sought to institute a new salary cap and restrictions on how much draft picks could receive upon entering the league.  One of their early stipulations, as well, was a longer regular season, which would bring in even more revenue to the owners, no matter the health risks to the players.

On the other side of the table, the players wanted to keep their share of the revenue, believing (quite rightly) that they are whom people pay to watch and, therefore, more deserving. They also asked for some more post-career benefits since the rate of injury is so high in. In the end, as the season approached and there was a real danger of game cancellations, the two sides came to an agreement, which gave more money to the owners and restricted draft pick payment. It also offered more healthcare benefits for the players as well as getting rid of the 18 game season. Although less overt than the NBA’s control struggle, this was still a dispute over who has control over the league and who reaped the rewards from it. While money was one main consideration, it was about more than just that. The owners sought to make the players subservient, just like the owners of the NBA wanted to do with their players.

At their base levels, each lockout is about cold, hard money, and who gets more of it. But inextricably tied to that is the idea of power and the attempt by owners to tamp down the players’ power, many of whom are young, empowered black men. As the NHL inches toward negotiations (the players are currently receiving 57 per cent of league revenue, a figure owners want to lower), we can expect to see this struggle all over again. If you’re looking for the most damaging aspect of money intertwined with sports, well, here it is.

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This is a completely logical argument. Fans aren’t a part of the official team and don’t have anything to do with its operation, besides showing up to games and buying merchandise. This puts them on the outside. The thing is, though, that there is no logic to being a sports fan. Being a fan is about wanting inclusiveness, about being part of something greater than yourself, about putting the weight of the world behind what is, ultimately, a game. There’s something intangible and bigger that links the fan and the team. “We” doesn’t make sense logically, but it makes sense as a fan.

The reasons people root for certain teams makes almost no sense. Most of the players on any team aren’t actually from the city itself, so civic pride and regionalism aren’t valid explanations. The players are impermanent. If they don’t move to a new team in free agency, they’ll retire eventually.  In essence, as Jerry Seinfeld once put it, we’re “rooting for laundry,” because only the jerseys remain constant.

The truth to being a fan, then, is assigning meaning to the team. Teams can come to represent something much bigger than they logically should: the Montreal Canadiens represent the whole of French Canada, even though only two players on the roster are actually from Quebec. The fans choose to use the sports team as a representative of their city and region in spite of any real connection on the part of the players.

This is mostly because fans are looking for a connection to something greater than themselves: to see an awesome play, and have it mean more than just athletics. It’s the triumph of whatever you want it to be. The triumph of one team becomes the triumph of one city, one culture, one way of life over the ambiguous “other,” which ends up being whoever we want the enemy to be.

This desire comes from the fact that fans are separated from the action. They can’t actively participate. There is no way to affect the game other than cheering. So, what do fans do? They stand up, cheer, without any pretence of logic. It is a beautiful delusion, stripped of any semblance to reason. Fans of the St. Louis Cardinals think that a squirrel running across the field during a playoff game propelled them to a World Series championship.  Fans burn jerseys. Fans adhere to ridiculous superstitions in an attempt to supernaturally aid their team. There’s no thought behind it, but it doesn’t need rationality. The fan clings to the culture of the team, becomes part of the greater community, and creates his or her own “we” – the players, the organization, and the fans.

The fans of any team are an integral part of the community created around a franchise. The die-hards live to follow the team, buy the merchandise, and show up to games (or, at least, monitor the game on TV or the internet). They assign meaning to the actions of the team, choosing to allow the franchise to represent the city, an attitude, or a way of life that appeals to them. Sure, there are teams that exist without many fans, but these are largely unsuccessful teams. The teams that exist without many fans don’t feel right: there is a conspicuous absence at every game, an eerie silence that is impossible to ignore.

Most fans don’t consciously use the word “we”. It just springs up when talking about the team, and I don’t think this assigns the speaker an active role within the team. Rather, the use of the word designates the speaker as an active member of the community created by the team. When a fan says, “Man, we could really use a new quarterback,” they could just be saying the team could really use a new quarterback, if only to make the team they invest so much energy into – and therefore their daily existence – better. There’s nothing wrong with saying, “well, we could really use some more offense,” because, sometimes, we really could: the players, the owners, the administrators, the front office, the fans, everyone.

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