A Coach’s Homophobic Taunt Forces Him to Reconsider the Weight of Words

Turner began to understand why his actions had been so hurtful when he received an angry text from Collins’s mother, Portia, whom he had always respected. Collins connected him to Cyd Zeigler, a founder of the website Outsports, who was an early critic, and Turner tried to repair relationships on campus by listening to how he had hurt others — including some gay members of the university’s athletic department.

Several months later, he attended an Outsports symposium at U.C.L.A., where he listened to gay and transgender athletes share their experiences. He heard Greg Louganis, the gold medal-winning diver, recount the panic he experienced when he hit his head on the diving platform at the 1988 Olympics and began bleeding in the pool, knowing he had contracted H.I.V. He listened to Dave Kopay, a closeted N.F.L. player in the ’60s and ’70s, speak about the torment of falling in love with a teammate.

“The fear, stress, pressure that all these people had experienced is not something I would have ever been forced to consider that carefully,” Turner said. “What I came away with was even greater admiration for the courage that anyone facing such a difficult choice or set of circumstances has to have.”

That’s what prompted him to send a supportive text to Lynch two years ago, when he came out as gay shortly after he was fired along with the rest of the staff at North Carolina-Wilmington. (There are no publicly gay Division I men’s coaches.)

“For Matt to have made that announcement at the time, especially when his career was on the line, that was a big risk,” Turner said. “It took real courage.”

Lynch said he was driving back from watching college players in an open gym during the early months of the pandemic, wondering whether he still had a career in basketball, when he received a text from Turner. Lynch recalled the incident with King, which he called a mistake, but said he had been around the game enough to know that coaches are always looking for a perceived edge, be it signing a recruit, scheduling a game, calling a play — or trying to get under the skin of an opponent.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/sports/ncaabasketball/irvine-russell-turner.html