Two years ago, I wrote:
Whatever you think about the merits of a gay man in baseball coming out publicly, I can’t possibly imagine a worse situation than ‘outing’ the star of a contending team in midseason against his will.
Obviously, this was a failure of imagination on my part, given the murder-for-hire story swirling around Mike Danton of the NHL’s St. Louis Blues . . . if the stories around Danton are true – and they may well not be – there can’t be anybody to be happy at this being the first public ‘outing’ of an active gay athlete in major team sports. See here for an example of a press release trying feverishly to spin this story as one about “homophobia” to get a sense of how unpleasant this whole thing is, or look at how hard some of the news stories are straining to avoid explaining the “relationship” Danton is purported to have had with his ‘roommate.’
Anyway, I won’t be following this bizarre saga, but Eric McErlain’s all over it.
Yeah, when I was reading the reports on this over the weekend, I was really having a hard time figuring out if they were saying it was a homosexual relationship or not – I settled on “probably”. It does make me wonder if this had anything to do with all the controversy when he was with the Devils – I know Lamoriello’s a hard-ass, but it always seemed that they were making mountains out of molehills and that there was more going on than the public knew about. At least no one actually got hurt here.
I saw someone somewhere else say this first, but if there�s ever a case which has future �Law & Order� episode written all over it, that would be it�