Don’t highlight athletes based on sexuality

If you follow professional football or basketball (or have watched Sportscenter sometime in the last two months), you have probably heard stories about Michael Sam and Jason Collins, a football player and basketball player respectively. These two athletes have been lauded for publicly announcing they were gay, with Collins being the first openly gay player in major team sports, and Sam being the first openly gay football player.

National Sports Media like Sportscenter, Sports Nation, and Yahoo Sports are promoting tolerance by celebrating their decision to come out, but they are also hindering progress for integrating gay people into major sports.

The problem with all the talk about these two players is that national media are making a big deal out of the players’ sexual preference, as if it should matter. I support both these athletes, but should they really be given so much attention?

Jason Collins dominated the news with his debut for the Brooklyn Nets on Feb. 23, but had zero points and two rebounds. As a basketball player, that is a bad night. Yet he was the entire highlight for that game, which the Nets won thanks to a great game from Deron Williams. Williams got little to no recognition.

Does it really preach tolerance to scrutinize every single stat a gay athlete produces and pretend that what he or she did is amazing? At the end of the day, each is just an athlete. Just a person. Just like the ethnicity or upbringing of other athletes do not define them, being gay should not define these players.

Imagine if media outlets still made a big deal out of a player’s race. Do sports networks focus on black or Hispanic players who perform poorly, and how unimpressive they were, simply because of their race? Of course not. They focus on the best players of the night.

The fight for gay rights has mirrored the fight for civil rights from decades ago. Nobody makes a big deal about minority players in professional sports anymore.

By shining so much spotlight on a mediocre performance, sports media are prohibiting true progress. A players’ sexual preference should not matter; his or her production is ALL that matters.

Their private lives are none of our business, and they should be judged as athletes before anything else.

Michael Sam and Jason Collins have taken the first step for gay athletes to be assimilated into professional team sports, and now it’s time for us to stop seeing them as gay people and see them solely as players.