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When he tells how he got to where he is today, John Amaechi likes to tell a story.
The year was 1999 and Amaechi, then a center for Magic, was considered by teammates — and much of the league — to be a strange duck. One of the first British NBA players, he drank tea, avoided the holidays and read psychology books on the team plane, studied to a degree, while others played cards.
One evening, while sitting at a table with four on the team’s flight, eating PF Chang’s catering and writing on a primitive laptop, a teammate sat down with him.
Amaechi shut down his computer, surprised. “Hey,” he said.
The teammate looked at Amaechi, then stated, “My girlfriend doesn’t like my wife very much.”
So it was. No preamble. So Amaechi did his best to help. “I hate it when I think about what I told him,” says Amaechi. “Because I know I was [as a therapist] back then. Knowing the right thing to say and the thing that closes your mouth, how much you let the breaks breathe — is something that catches on over time. You don’t really get it at first because you think therapy is advice. It’s not that. He asks people questions. You notice things. ”
Amaechi kept it that way, however, and by the time he retired from the NBA, in 2003, after five seasons split between the Cavs, Magi and Jazz, he was on his way to receiving his doctorate and starting a second career. away. by the court, as he had always planned.
As he was coming out of the door, Amaechi decided to shake the pot a little.
The news came on February 7, 2007. “In a revolutionary revelation that began to win across the NBA,” wrote ABC News, “Amaechi became the first professional basketball player to openly identify himself. as gay. ”
Maybe you remember the general reaction. The revelation of Amaechi, in his book Man in the Middle, led to a celebration in the LGBTQ community. “It’s very important for children, so they don’t feel alone in the world,” said Martina Navratilova, the most prominent openly gay athlete at the time. “We are models. We are adults, and we know we are not alone — but children don’t know it. “
“What John did is amazing,” said Esera Tuaolo, who came out in 2002, three years after ending his career as an NFL defensive tackle. “He doesn’t know how much he saves lives by telling the truth.”
Others responded with less enthusiasm. “Unless you bring your homosexuality upon me, I’m fine,” said 76v Shavlik Randolph. LeBron James, in his fourth season with the Cavaliers, spoke of trust: . ” But the biggest reaction came from Tim Hardaway, a five-time All-Star who was four years out of the league at the time. “I hate gay people, so let it be known,” Hardaway said on The Dan Le Batard Show. “I don’t want to be on my team. … If he was on my team, I would, you know, really distance myself from him because, uh, I don’t think he’s right. … I don’t think he should be in the locker room while we’re in the locker room. ”
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Fury broke out, one that would follow Hardaway — and, to some extent, Amaechi — for years. And then the world went on. Read also : Slovenia National Day – US State Department. For most American sports fans, Amaechi’s announcement is likely to remain the last thing they remember about him. A great English man. Drink plenty of tea. The first NBA player to come out.
And many people can be happy with this legacy. It’s not the worst thing to be known as a pro athlete and trailblazer, after all. Brands were built on less.
But Amaechi is not like most people, and certainly not like most NBA players. A story like his requires telling two separate but intertwined stories: the story of John Amaechi, and the story of what John Amaechi represents.
One recent spring morning he took me to his top-floor apartment in the Covent Garden neighborhood of London, not far from the theater district and the Royal Opera House. This morning, as with many, he has been up since 3:45, when he has prepared enough tea to fill three thermoses, from which he drinks during the day.
Now 51, his head is shaved and his beard finely trimmed traces of his jaw before reaching its climax in a magnificent white goatee, which, when paired with round glasses and a dark frame, give the impression of an exceptionally great guru or professor. Which is, basically.
After retiring from the NBA, Amaechi earned that degree. He did the thousands of hours of training required, studied family therapy, obtained his MFT, and then specialized in organizational psychology, and obtained accreditation from the British Psychological Society. He picked up a number of other titles, including becoming a fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health, setting up a psychology-based consulting firm, now known as APS Intelligence, and starting to work with businesses across Europe, which focuses on teamwork, leadership, efficiency. , diversity and inclusion.
In his living room you will find several praises of research, along with a photo of him with Barack Obama, a volume on cognitive psychology and a mug that reads UFOs I SPEAK MYSELF (SOMETIMES I NEED AN EXPERT ANALYSIS). Even his knick-knacks — a fair part of which are Star Wars-themed — help tell his story. Ask Amaechi about the Encanto figurines on the shelf of his books and he exclaims, “I mean, there’s a cartoon about intergenerational trauma and its impacts on people’s behavior, which I think is fascinating.”
With just a little research, however, you can find some reminders of his first career. There, wedged at the bottom of the library, is one volume: The NBA Encyclopedia, in which Amaechi appears near the beginning, between Aluma, Peter and Amaya, Ashraf. Its online presence is similarly redundant; he wants to scroll through 18 experiences on his LinkedIn page (where he lists himself as a “daily Jedi”) before, at the bottom, you find mentioning any affiliation with the NBA, where his experience is described simply: Player.
Amaechi addressed the British contingent at the 2014 Paralympic Games in Glasgow.
Amaechi has few reasons to slow down his career — and to wear his long CV like a “sandwich board,” as he puts it. The first is practical. “The stereotypes around athletes don’t lead to people [taking me seriously]. … It takes a long time to convince the general population that a great black person is smart, ”he says. “So, it’s a piece of useless background knowledge … which still means nothing to a lot of people here.”
Here in Europe, where Amaechi is a sought-after speaker and something of a thought leader. Much of what people get when they bring their company, from what I can tell, is a big dose of John. In addition, it hosts podcasts and virtual Q&A. Recently, he interviewed popular science author Adam Grant for APS. Soon, he will be interviewing director JJ Abrams. He writes for The Guardian and weighs in on social and cultural issues for CNN and The Dan Le Batard Show. When the BBC needed someone to explain the concept of white privilege for a series of videos aimed at school children, the producers asked Amaechi. “White privilege doesn’t mean you didn’t work hard or you didn’t deserve the success you had,” Amaechi said. “It does not mean that your life is not hard or that you have never suffered. It just means that the color of your skin was not the cause of your suffering or suffering. ” Those videos went viral, bringing in more than four million views. (Like viral things, some loved them, and some hated them.)
In the morning I visit, I am presenting a virtual keynote with a French company in the advertising and PR sector. By 7:45 he had gone to sit in his home office on the ground floor of the flat. Partly because of the pandemic, and partly because Amaechi is an introvert — he likes people but finds them “high energy” —he does almost all of his work here, in a converted bedroom equipped with a green screen, a bench lights. and two webcams.
During his NBA days Amaechi did the All-Interview team, and to spend any amount of time with him is to understand why. He’s funny, can talk in paragraphs and has a habit of disarming that stops a little longer than expected. He presents it as self-deprecating but authoritative, peppering his speech with psychological terms like “introjected regulation,” which then waves away, so as not to sound clogged, saying, essentially, You don’t need to remember this, but you know it’s a thing.
Scattered on Amaechi’s shirt this morning: ACCOUNTABILITY IS SEXY. Personal responsibility is a recurring theme, both in his speeches and in his recent book, The Promises of Giants, which argues that leaders must be aware of their impact at all times and that transparency, empathy and responsibility are of paramount importance. “Tough, objective, regular feedback is one of the ways we show that we care,” he tells the French company’s execs.
During the day, I watch Amaechi present, take calls, and lead a couple of one-on-one executive coaching sessions. While saying the APS is financially successful, with offices in Manchester and London, and 20 employees, he hopes his work with Fortune 100 companies will someday subsidize a turn towards training a new generation of leaders that is “Wider and more diverse. He compares this compromise to a Marvel filmmaker so he can also do an indie project.
I listen on one of these indies, a free training session with a young and successful exec in a non-profit organization. In the middle of the conversation, Amaechi rewrites what this woman said to indicate what she feels is missing in her life.
Quietly, start crying. He wonders why.
“No one has ever explained this to me before,” she says.
Orrajt. to feel that way, Amaechi tells her. “Some of the most successful people are deeply sad.”
Amaechi grew up in Stockport, not far from Manchester, the son of a white English doctor and a Nigerian businessman. (John’s name is Uzoma Ekwugha Amaechi.) The rare dark-skinned boy in a white community felt like a stranger from an early age. Introverted, “fat and nerdy,” he raised his classmates, whom he remembers looking at him and calling him “the Whales.” He saw in their faces contempt, suspicion, pity. And so he retired to his room to read science fiction books and eat sweets.
When he read The Hunchback of Notre Dame as a schoolboy, he did so in one day, and he felt like he had never seen before — the story reflects how he felt treated by others. Years later he was learning a term in psychology, coined in 1902 by the American sociologist Charles Cooley: the self-glass-glass. Essentially, we each develop our identity based on the perceptions of others.
Then, when Amaechi was 17, a man stopped him on the street and said he looked great in basketball. Not good, great. John tried it. He missed the backboard in his first shot. Even so, in court they felt special. Other boys contested to choose him for their team. By high school he was writing in his yearbook that his ambition was “to play in an NBA league team in the States and earn a lot of money.” It doesn’t matter that only three English players have played in the league in the previous 40 years, or that John had no connection to the United States. He wrote letters to dozens of American high schools, asking if they had any use for a well-graded 6’9 “British basketball player. He eventually found a home in a Jesuit high school in Toledo.
To pursue his dream, John had to leave behind his mother, Wendy, the guiding light in his life, who had cancer. A British doctor, Wendy had followed John’s father, who used an anglicized Jon, to Nigeria, and provided medical care in the field as Jon fought in the three-year Biafran civil war. When it became apparent that Jon’s ethnic group, the Igbo, was about to lose the war, the couple fled on foot, eating grubs and berries to survive.
The union did not last long. Jon became, as John says, a “malignant” presence, and Wendy escaped with John and his two brothers. As on that trek off Nigeria, she went into survival mode, working long hours to support the family. John remembers how often she got up when she woke up and didn’t come back before bed.
It was Wendy who helped John with what he called “the plan,” his unlikely strategy to make the NBA. From Toledo he obtained a scholarship to Vanderbilt, where he rode on the bench, then transferred to Penn State, where he became an All-American Academic and the leader of every school time, at that time, in blocked shots. . During her junior year, Wendy passed away at the age of 51.
Amaechi’s two-year line in Utah: 2.8 points and 1.6 rebounds per game.
Fernando Medina / NBAE / Getty Images
After graduation he realized his dream, becoming the first free drafted agent to start in his first game in the NBA, at the center of the Cavs. According to Amaechi’s count, only two other players had drawn anything resembling a seven-year-old draw: Hakeem Olajuwon and Tim Duncan.
Of course, Amaechi quickly notices that he is a “shadow” of those two Hall of Famers. But still: He did it. At least momentarily. He pitched in Cleveland and spent the next three years working in Greece, Italy and France before joining Orlando, where a rookie coach named Doc Rivers took a chance on him. In the end, Amaechi played five NBA seasons, for three teams, averaging 6.2 points and 2.6 rebounds and provided endless color for the beat writers, who cheered with his quirks and joins for Earl. Gray. (“For the Englishman in the NBA alone,” Franz Lidz wrote for Sports Illustrated, “basketball is not his cup of tea.”)
Most Americans found Amaechi in particular, never more so than in 2000, when, after his peak season with the Magic, Jerry West and the Lakers flew him to Los Angeles and offered him a six-year, $ 17- contract. the million. As Amaechi recalls, West took to a fancy restaurant and said, “We’re ready to sign you now.” Amaechi was playing with the legendary Phil Jackson and supporting Shaquille O’Neal. “It was like I was presented with everything I ever wanted,” he says, “and in the presence of these basketball gods.”
And yet, Amaechi refused everything, instead of re-signing with the Magi for $ 600,000 a year. One can only imagine the trolling that turned out to have existed on the NBA Twitter at the time. As it was, Lakers fans flooded Amaechi’s inbox with emails informing him of his deep idiocy. But Amaechi felt attached to the Magi, who gave him a second chance. As he later explained: “When people ask me [what is the value of my word], I can say, at least $ 17 million.” (He ended up making $ 9.5 million throughout his career, per Basketball Reference.)
Amaechi loved that jumping Magic team, a group of bad people and underdogs — hustlers like Darrell Armstrong and Bo Outlaw — led by Rivers, one of the only Black coaches in the league and perhaps the most open-minded. at that time. Amaechi says: “He was one of the few coaches who didn’t feel threatened by the fact that basketball wasn’t my whole body.”
For his part, Rivers took to Amaechi. “He was very smart,” says the coach. Also note that Amaechi was different in many ways, but one way in particular. “He wasn’t known on the team [that he was gay],” he says. “But I say he was a suspect, if you know what I’m saying.”
At one point, a teammate gathered in front of the Orlando plane, then chose a suitable emissary to send back, in front of a veteran named Monty Williams. Amaechi recalls in the exchange:
“Meech,” Williams said. “He doesn’t talk much about women.”
“Cool, just check,” Williams said.
And that was that. Undoubtedly, Williams, a devout Christian, had his beliefs about homosexuality, but Amaechi felt no ill will. Asked now if this surprises anything, Amaechi stops. “I don’t think you’ve ever made the assumption that being religious makes you a hole — or you have to, of course. … My sense is that many people who are devotly religious in the way that Jesus was, or thought Islam, would probably be quite pleasant to understand with them. So, I don’t necessarily assume that people have hang-ups, because I’m not asking other people to be gay. It won’t come out of my pores in other people. You do you. I will not go to church on Sunday; I will not ask God that I cannot see. And you don’t have to beat the blocks. I’ve never felt so complicated. “
… And with Orlando: 9.2 points and 3.3 rebounds.
Nathaniel S. Butler / NBAE / Getty Images
Amaechi made a handful of friends during those NBA days, including Tariq Abdul-Wahad, Andrei Kirilenko and Greg Ostertag, the 7 ‘2 “center for Utah, where Amaechi played his last two seasons. we play video games together, and Ostertag, who grew up in Dallas, has fond memories of those days. “How is my John?” he remembers.He remembers Amaechi as “funny,” “opinion” and “super smart, a little higher than my grade.”
Ostertag now works as a real estate agent in Paris, Texas, a city of 24,000, about as big as the red state, selling mostly farmland— “but selling something,” he says. Ostertag has no problem with the sexuality of his old friend. “I can’t care less,” he says. “I am just happy for John. Good for John. ” Ostertag likes to think this would have been his response back in the early 2000s, if Amaechi had come out when he was his partner. “I hope I accepted it and treated it no differently,” says Ostertag. “John would have known he was [gay], and I’m not, and I think in private I didn’t treat him any differently.” Stop. “It simply came to our notice then. I don’t want to say anything to get into trouble, but here I am trying to be honest. When you’re young, you think it’s wrong to be gay. “
The team’s first publicly released team athlete, David Kopay, did this in 1975, three years after the end of his NFL running back career.
In 1982, Glenn Burke, the third retired baseman for the Dodgers, became the first baseball player to emerge, in history for Inside Sports. Burke had made no secret of his sexuality; according to his autobiography, Out at Home, the Dodgers even offered to pay him if he participated in a fake marriage.
In the following decades, other men’s team sports athletes followed. In 1990, Justin Fashanu became the first professional football player to emerge, in Britain. (Eight years later, he killed himself, at the age of 36.) Ian Roberts, an Australian rugby star, came out in ’94. Eventually, by the turn of the century, the NBA remained one of only two holdouts among the top sports of the American men’s team, along with the NHL. Then Amaechi broke that barrier. Six years later, in 2013, Jason Collins became the second NBA player, and the first active one, to emerge.
Real Jason Collins’s 2013 Sports Illustrated Cover Story
And so the floods came. On the same subject : Is there a shortage of food? What the Utah authorities tell you to do. As the culture changed, and as the courts legalized same-sex marriage, and as athletes became common, the most progressive men’s sports championship in the United States led the way.
I’m kidding. That’s what maybe I was waiting for. Instead, in 2022, Collins and Amaechi remained the only two NBA players to come out publicly. Which leads to the obvious question: Why?
“You never underestimate people’s power to be a dick.”
Amaechi and I are discussing this problem on the way from lunch to his apartment, and as we walk people look at him. He once made a short film in which he wore body cameras that captured people’s reactions to him. He would walk and, once passing, would tend to point or make a gesture to a friend or take a picture.
Partly for this reason, he orders most of everything, including groceries and meals. Earlier this morning an energetic young man named Chris came to load Amaechi with new shirts, tailored to his huge frame.
“No one ever looks up,” he later says from his wrap-around patio, from which he can observe London without being noticed. Here he sees the world: the ice cream shop on the corner, the bar where merchants throw the hammer at lunch, the top-floor restaurant where, on nice days, all customers fight for the six outdoor tables.
But he digresses, as he often does. Amaechi says he has no beef with Tim Hardaway, who subsequently apologized publicly for his anti-gay statement, although Amaechi says Hardaway never reached out personally. For years, Hardaway told people that his comments kept him out of the Hall of Fame. When he was finally selected, this past spring, Amaechi received emails, saying, “from people who told me,‘ Look, despite all your efforts, Tim will enter the Hall of Fame. ’” With it Amaechi laughs . “It simply came to our notice then. I didn’t do anything! ”
As for LeBron’s comments about how trust with teammates relates to openness about sexuality, Amaechi calls that idea “an incredibly dense piece of logic.”
“We’re all responsible for being the kind of person other people are willing to share with,” he says. “It is absolutely true that if an LGBTQ person comes out to you, it is a statement about you, unless [that revelation] has been forced. He: I think you deserve to know, and I think you will treat it with care and discretion. If you’re the kind of person who didn’t make it happen, then you’re the kind of person who hasn’t behaved consistently enough in the right way. ” Although James never apologized for the “trust” comment, he supported Collins when he came out six years later, saying: “I think he’s gorgeous, man. None of us should go wondering what [they think. ] other people we should be human beings. I think it’s very strong of him. “)
When Amaechi went public, he did so after seeing British actor Ian McKellen in a Gay Pride parade. “You see a boy rising, looking like they are being filled with a kind of glorious helium, only by the waves of a stranger,” he recalls thoughtfully. “And the truth is: In the LGBTQ community, not many people who are praised like me. It’s good to have leaders who stand up and be role models, so that [other] people realize that it can be weird, chaotic. “
Amaechi, in 2017, joined Elton John (glasses) and gay rugby player Gareth Thomas (second from right) to benefit the London AIDS Foundation.
Dave Benett / Getty Images for BVLGARI
This is a theme that Amaechi returns to often. When in the eyes of the public, he believes, “you have no choice but to be a model — the only choice is whether you are good or bad.”
Amaechi knew that some people would consider him a model when he came out, just as he knew other people would cut him. He just didn’t expect his sexuality to become the only thing people knew about him. He had no idea anyone was going to mention his unprecedented path to the NBA. “Has anyone heard that story?” asks. “No. Because I’m just a gay man. Because identity wins out. ”
Which brings us back to the question: Why didn’t more NBA players come out? I asked a handful of other people in the world of sports, including Hudson Taylor, the founder of Athlete Ally, a non-profit organization dedicated to making athletic communities more inclusive. “There’s a risk-reward calculation that doesn’t go wrong on the part of the outgoing player,” says Taylor, who each year, along with Jason Collins, talks to incoming NBA players. “The average career of an NBA player is three years, and many professional athletes are not set to earn a significant living outside of their sport.” This means: Many athletes have a very narrow window to earn the majority of the money they draw for the rest of their lives. “So, if that’s what’s at stake — if there’s any sense that the exit could reduce that [window] or lead to it being traded — any perception of risk will keep an athlete closed.”
Doc Rivers sticks to the status quo. “It’s sports, and [being gay] is still considered, in many ways, taboo,” he says. “It shouldn’t be.” He wonders if it will take a star player to come out to change things, but he also thinks money is an issue. “They don’t want this to hurt in any way when they sign a gain agreement.”
Regarding Amaechi, however, he begins by challenging the key question. “If it’s just about being able to point to a gay person,” he says, “I’m not sure [that] is a good sign of progress, really.
“There are a lot of gay players in the league. They are well known to their peers — at least some of them — and their peers. And some of their partners are also well known with family and friends in the family room and friends. If what we mean is that no journalist is allowed to talk about [their sexuality], then that is true. But it’s a weird workplace, isn’t it? … [In the NBA] there are your colleagues — 10 to 15 on your team — and then there’s an audience of 30,000 to 10 million people watching you. ”
He looks at me. “It’s weird, isn’t it?”
“And people aren’t in the closet just because you don’t know [they’re gay]. People didn’t get the right to know, that’s the truth. Fat bloke, front seat, 12C — you didn’t get the right to know. You just shouted obscenities at me for missing a free throw. You don’t know me at all. ”
True, no one counts the number of gay athletes in sports like women’s soccer. Isn’t there a point where it becomes somewhat normalized, and isn’t that a good thing?
“Because people have already decided things that women don’t care as much as things that men do, even if that thing is the same thing,” Amaechi intervenes. “This is the truth, and we have to start saying that, because the misrepresentation of the status quo is part of how change fails. You cannot build a switch from a fake platform. This idea that everyone appreciates women as much as men, that’s bulls —. ” (Among the many topics Amaechi and I discuss on our various conversations, including Russia, gun violence and racial profiling, he brings a particularly animated about the news, leaked a week before my visit , which the Supreme Court intends to reverse Roe v. Wade.)
Amaechi continues. “We have to keep saying this to people: Women don’t matter as much as men. Black and brown people don’t matter as much as white people. People without disabilities are more important than people with disabilities. These are full-stop facts. We cannot make any progress until we say that this is the truth. “
He becomes animated. The cool psychologist’s tone is gone.
“Do you want gay people to come out? Change the a – holes around them, and not just the teammates, because they don’t care the most — but the equipment managers and weight coaches and the managers and team owners, who we all know which are a progressive group, and general organizations, one that has just constructively expelled an athlete for a knee injury. Yes, that’s a safe place to go. ” It moves sarcastically. “She’s the weakest one among the organizations that say [the lack of outside athletes] is about stupid jocks beating you in the locker room.” (For what it’s worth: Rivers, now the 76ers coach, agrees that teammates wouldn’t be the issue, if they ever were. ”It would be uncomfortable in the locker room for a very short time,” he says. , like a day or two. If man can play, they don’t care. “)
Amaechi leans forward now. “We are focusing on the wrong people. Do you want gay people [to go out]? Do so is not so s —- y. Make it so that someone can still look at you and see what you have achieved. Then maybe people deserve that disclosure. ”
This is a point that Amaechi returns to repeatedly: Why is the weight so often placed on athletes to get out? “It simply came to our notice then. Not about honesty. It is personal and private information about me that people who give s — about me deserve to know — and people who don’t, no. If you pour your beer out of the tunnel as I walk, do you deserve anything? ”
To see her as Amaechi does is to turn the narrative around. It’s valid to ask why, in NBA culture, men may not feel comfortable going out, but it’s not, he says, the right question. Amaechi takes an example from his own life. “Even today, I don’t tell everyone that I’m gay. Why should I do it? I went on a date the other day, and it suddenly hit me as I looked at this person: I never held my partner’s hand in public. I am 51 years old. ”
“Never. I had [a few] people I had been with for three, four and five years, I never held their hands in public. And not because I — well, I don’t like to touch, that’s true, but that’s not the reason. It’s that I just don’t want to deal with it. Because I will. Because I am human, I will deal with it. Did you have something to say? And then it’s no longer a date, so it’s a f — ing activist thing. “
He’s not stopping now. He is angry. “Maybe you can do it so that if you kiss your partner when you leave the office, or hold your hand, nobody says anything — then we graduate from there, before we get to NBA players who are supposed to come out as rescuers. ”
Amaechi’s phone rings. He is late for a call with his APS team. “I have to take it,” he says and hustles off, letting me understand what he said, and what to do with it.
Where is John Amaechi now? The best question might be Who is John Amaechi now? Because the answer is definitely not a “retired NBA player.” Rather, he is a psychologist, executive, mentor, instigator and Star Wars fan. It is either to state the truth or a liberal bag, depending on who is doing the labeling. He is an introvert and ponderer and a husband next to his mother every day.
And, in sports — men’s sports, anyway — it’s a symbol of a world that felt like it was changing but maybe it hasn’t changed that much.
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