Amaechi: "I Underestimated America"

Former NBA player John Amachi, who recently came out as gay, says the reaction to that news has been "overwhelmingly supportive and positive."

"I underestimated America. I braced myself for the wrath of a nation under God," Amaechi said at the Log Cabin Republicans' annual convention. "I imagined that it would be a firestorm, that it would be some insane number of letters demanding my deportation or my death.

"And in fact, 95 percent of the correspondence I've had have been overwhelmingly supportive and positive," Amaechi said. "But I will say that the 5 percent that I've had have been unbelievably, viscerally, frighteningly negative."

Not surprisingly, the reaction of his former teammates and employers has been quite different:

"Probably 30 of my former [NBA] teammates have my e-mail and my telephone contacts and probably 16 or so of those I was in regular touch with and there are probably 10 people who I have [on instant messenger]. And zero -- nobody -- who's active in the NBA has been in touch with me since the day I came out, despite the fact that most of them knew I was gay in the first place," Amaechi said.

He also wondered why nba.com, the league's official Web site, has never mentioned his homosexuality when it was such a huge sports story everywhere else.

There is a lot more in the ESPN article about how Amaechi sees the sports world slowly, much more so than the balance of society, moving toward accepting GLBT people and his recent experience as a "gay sports ambassador" that is worth checking out.