Chuck Culpepper on being a gay sportswriter, thanking Brendon Ayanbadejo

l hired Chuck for The National. Later, he was one of my successors in loving Kentucky. I followed him, online stalker that I am, to Portland, Newsday and again at The National, this time the Dubai verson. I celebrated when we were reunited at Sports on Earth. He's all class all the time, when writing, when being Chuck. No one could have written that column better.

 

Everything else aside, I love how Chuck wrote that intensely personal column and still put the reader right there in the locker room with him.

Great writing.

 

Also does a very nice job with Ayanbadejo's role. For a second-tier player with seven career starts in nine years, the guy is going to have a commendable place in history.

 

I consider myself lucky to call Chuck a friend, though a distant one. We don't talk often, but he's always been unfailingly kind to me.

This comment on the column struck me:

When we lived in Kentucky (my parents still do) my mom wouldn't read the sports section, but she'd read Chuck. She always said he made it so you didn't have to know the sport, you just had to love a good story and reading about people. It's truly a gift he has, and he's carried it everywhere he's gone.

I'll send this to my mom, and she'll read it. And the next time I talk to Chuck, I'm sure he'll ask about my mom, though they've never met. He's that kind of guy.

 

This was just lovely.

 

Chuck has always been a favorite, and I can relate, sort of, to this. For me it was simply learning something so vital about someone I felt I had known for years because of his columns. In reality, we've never met. This was startling and simple and sweet.

 

I am tempted to say, "Who cares," simply because I believe that a person's sexual orientation shouldn't be anyone else's business, whichever way it falls.

But that is some mighty fine writing, and it sheds light on a subject that needs more light shed upon it.

I will say to my gay friends and colleagues, change is coming, and soon. When a right-leaning 57-year-old Southerner like me is willing to go to bat in favor of gay marriage, then you can be sure that change you seek is right around the corner.

 

Like Chuck, I'm amazed how far we've come as a society in just a decade or so on this issue. It's proof that the fight for civil rights is worth it, however incremental the gains 0ften seem.

 

Fabulous.

 

I love how he didn't come out and say, "I'm gay," to 51. That, to me, made the column - and, also, the exchange. They both knew what he meant. There are very few novelists or screen writers who can force themselves way from that kind of on-the-nose, spell-it-out line. But Culpepper could. Excellent work.

 

I crossed paths with him once in the late 1990s and one of my co-workers said in a hushed voice, "He's gay..." I don't know if it was a rumor then or if some people knew... I didn't care then and I didn't think twice about it.

He's one of those guys who everybody who has worked with or alongside him has nothing but positive things to say about him.

 

There sure are a lot of cliched adjectives on this thread.