NEW YORK: John Amaechi is gay, and now the first player in the National Basketball Association to disclose his homosexuality publicly is ready to talk about it.
Amaechi, a British center who played five seasons with four different U.S. teams and helped England to the bronze medal at last year's Commonwealth Games, is scheduled to appear Sunday on the Outside the Lines program on the U.S. sports cable channel ESPN. His autobiography "Man in the Middle," will be released Feb. 14.
"He is coming out of the closet as a gay man," Amaechi's publicist Howard Bragman said Wednesday.
Three years after his playing career ended, Amaechi has become the sixth professional male athlete from one of the four major American sports leagues (NBA, Major League Baseball, National Football League, National Hockey League) to publicly discuss his homosexuality.
Former NFL running back David Kopay publicly declared his homosexuality in 1977; offensive lineman Roy Simmons and defensive lineman Esera Tuaolo did so more recently. Glenn Burke, an outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Oakland A's in the 1970s, and Billy Bean, a utility player in the 1980s and 1990s, also have made public declarations.
In his book, Amaechi describes being gay in a league where it is assumed that all players are heterosexual. He writes that while playing in Utah, coach Jerry Sloan used anti-gay innuendo to describe him.
Sloan said Wednesday that although his relationship with Amaechi was "shaky" because of the player's attitude, he didn't know Amaechi was gay. Sloan had no comment about Amaechi's contention in the book that Sloan used anti-gay innuendo when referring to him. Amaechi said he found out about it in e-mails from friends in the Jazz front office.
When asked if knowing Amaechi was gay would have mattered, Sloan said: "Oh yeah, it would have probably mattered. I don't know exactly, but I always have peoples' feelings at heart. People do what they want to do. I don't have a problem with that."
Amaechi, 36, played 301 NBA games over five seasons. The 2.08-meter (6-foot-10) center averaged 6.2 points and 2.6 rebounds in the NBA.
After playing U.S. college ball at Penn State University, he began his NBA career with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 1995-96, then played with five teams over three seasons in Europe (Cholet and Limoges in France, Kinder Bologna in Italy, Greece's Panathinaikos and England's Sheffield Sharks.)
He rejoined the NBA to play for the Orlando Magic from 1999-01, then played two seasons for the Utah Jazz.
The Jazz traded him to Houston, which traded him to the New York Knicks. When the Knicks waived him in January 2004, he retired. He came out of retirement to play for England in last year's Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Australia.
