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Sports

Michael Sam and the Burden of Being a Symbol

Michael Sam has become and continues to be something other than a guy trying to make an NFL team. Changing that is the path to real change.
Phota via Jasen Vinlove-USA TODAY Sports

Michael Sam is hardly a football player anymore. This was true before he was cut by the St. Louis Rams over the weekend, cleared waivers, and started searching for a team with an open practice squad spot. When Sam publicly stepped out of the closet in February and let us know that the first openly gay man in the NFL would be, not a great player, but a mid-to-late round pick who might struggle to make a roster, he guaranteed that the conversation surrounding him would be much different than if he were a prospect of, say, Jadeveon Clowney's caliber. His struggle would immediately be the central focus of everything said and written about him.

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We're seeing that now more than ever. Sam's borderline-ness lets others project what they most want to be onto him. There are pompous, self-styled realists telling you he didn't deserve to be on the Rams' depth chart. Each of them doth protest too much about how they're wholly unconcerned with Sam's sexuality. They're just here to tell you the unmitigated truth about every player in the National Football League, no matter who they are. There are progressives who have framed Sam's release as just another obstacle placed in the path of a great man who will, they have no doubt, utterly persevere. They want you to know which side they're on, even if they have to cast Sam in bronze to do it. There are head-in-sand folks who think Sam's unemployment has absolutely nothing to do with his orientation. They believe the NFL is a meritocracy, and that to suggest otherwise is preposterous. Each group uses Sam's predicament to tell you who they are.

Professional sports tend to chew up human beings and spit out abstractions. This is especially true of the NFL, where no one is allowed to have a personality, but even in leagues that don't tamp down on smiling, the players are at a remove from us. We view them through several panes of frosted glass erected by media, shoe companies, PR people, and the athletes themselves. We don't talk about LeBron James so much as we talk about LeBron James™ or "LeBron James." That's troubling in its own way, but in Michael Sam's case, the way he has been abstracted seems to run counter to what he's trying to accomplish.

One of the big messages the LGBT community has pushed over the course of their fight for equality has been that they're not all that different from straight folks. They want to love whomever they love, and to not be shunned for it. They're people, in other words. Michael Sam's problem is that sports and the discourse around them make it nearly impossible for people to be people. It might be true that Sam is too slow coming off the edge or that he's a great man or that the reason he's currently jobless is based on merit. What's definitely true is that he's a guy trying to turn his vocation into a career, and he's having a hard time. If we use that to anchor our understanding of Sam, we'll do him less of a disservice than we are now. We'll stop talking about ourselves, and start talking about someone who matters.

Colin McGowan is a writer living in Chicago. His work has appeared at Sports on Earth, Deadspin, and Salon. He tweets on Twitter.