Columns

Two Men, Two Secrets, One Bond

A straight goalie at a minor league hockey game--who fought through his own physical demons--is a catalyst for the author, who remembers his struggles being a gay man in sports.

By Rob Schultz
For Outsports.com

I have often heard there are no coincidences in life, that all our friends, associates and experiences are drawn to us for a reason. 

This always struck me as a crock of intergalactic BS. 

It's all outlined in his book "Man Made: A Memoir of My Body", a searing and revealing account of sexual identity thrown haywire by a brain tumor. His story comes as close as anything I've encountered to a straight jock knowing--truly knowing--the conflicts and confusion of a gay man's coming out. For both Ken and myself, sports had a central role in a secret in our lives, something that had nearly torn each of us apart. While the secrets were different, their devastating effect was similar. For both of us that evening, the tides of a painful past crested and ebbed away, never to touch us in quite the same way again. 

If that sounds flowery bear with me. Perhaps, in a few minutes, you will understand. 

I had popped over to the game completely by chance, during a road trip of my own to clear my head. Although Bakersfield--rural, conservative, NRA territory--would hardly seem to be the place for a gay guy from West Hollywood to clear his head, the town of 200,000 a hundred miles north of LA held a powerful place in my psyche. 

In the Bakersfield Closet

For Bakersfield was a place 16 years ago where my ambitions collided with reality, where I was first an intern and then an on-air sports reporter and part-time weekend sports anchor at two of the local network affiliate TV stations. It was also the place where my own struggles with sexual identity ran head-on into a brick wall. 

The culture shock of moving from LA to Bakersfield in September 1985 was like a bomb exploding in my soul. I chafed against the small town atmosphere that discouraged diversity of any kind. I was not out to anyone at the time, not even my family. So my years there felt dangerous and clandestine. I was truly alone, in what I perceived was an alien land. I can only liken the experience to that of a soldier or spy living behind enemy lines. I had a cover I could not blow, and had to be very, very careful. 

Paranoid? You bet. But you couldn't have told me then.  

If I wanted to be a sportscaster, I had many years of similar small-market experience ahead of me and needed to know if I could handle it. 

Had I been stronger with a bit thicker skin, a bit less introspective, a bit more able to go along to get along, and a bit more of an adrenaline junkie, I might have stayed. But whatever makes me what I am said it was time to pack it in, so I did. 

Because of that, the air of Bakersfield crackles with unresolved emotion. Like a veteran returning to the battlefield years later, the guns, now silent, still resonate. The inner struggles I fought, the incredibly sensitive kid I was, the doubts, the hair-trigger sensitivity all come back. For though it was an incredibly painful time, it was also an incredibly alive time, and my consciousness, while riddled with doubt and uncertainty was shot through with the sense I was really laying it on the line, an experience both intense and adventurous. In a way, I was at war. And war, while exhausting, awful and terrifying, can also exhilarate. The sense of danger, the edge, was palpable and truth is, I miss it. 

An Athlete Laid Low by a Bizarre Malady

For Ken, Bakersfield was his rubicon, his line in the sand, though he may not have known it at the time. It signified one last opportunity to live his dream. Like so many kids growing up, Ken participated actively in sports. Unlike many kids, Ken was very good. During high school, he played for the U.S. Olympic developmental program alongside future NHL stars Mike Modano, Tony Amonte and Jeremy Roenick. He went on to play collegiate hockey at Colgate. He was on track for the big time, his goal of playing in the NHL a real possibility. 

No one knows when the brain tumor first took hold. What you can bet money on is that by the time he took to the nets for Colgate, it was on its way towards putting his hormonal balance at a two-man disadvantage, and his sexual identity into the penalty box. It caused a rare disorder in which his system was flooded with the female hormone prolactin--150 times that of a normal man and 8 times that of a nursing mother. His biology was thrown into chaos, his testosterone levels drastically suppressed. The flood of the hormone caused his breasts to grow large and sensitive, made him unable to grow facial hair and add muscle mass to his frame, no matter how hard he worked. It packed fat onto his hips, so noticeable his college teammates nicknamed him "Pear".  

And it plunged him into a painful, confusing gender netherworld. His life became one of shame, marred by his inability to become aroused around women. He lived in fear of sex, of his inability to perform, to live up to the macho image of a top athlete. He was terrified that somehow this secret that he couldn't explain would get out. It forced him to question what it truly means to be a man, to throw out many of the tired clichés he'd been brought up to believe. And at an age when most of his buddies were off to the races, he was starting from scratch. 

Ken had become a mirror for me. In him, I found someone who reflected my own experience more than many of my non-sports oriented gay friends. Unlike me, Ken Baker was straight. Yet like me, he loved sports and wanted with all his heart to be one of the guys. And for reasons he couldn't explain, he had a secret he feared would separate him from his buddies, himself and what he loved most. He was horribly alone because he knew he was different in a way that defied description, in a way he'd dare not speak. He was forced to throw away the rule book, to become an explorer, to fend for himself in a suddenly mysterious land. 

For me, as a budding sportscaster, the emotional toll of the secrecy, of simply not knowing how much acceptance was out there, was suffocating. For Ken, an athlete sentenced to live up to an image, the double-whammy of his altered biology and the shame of his secret put the kibosh on his NHL aspirations. For both of us, it seemed, a nagging sense of incompletion remained. 

Which brought us to the Centennial Garden Arena that night- Ken for his first start in more than years, and me, unknowing that this ``chance'' weekend getaway was about to explode in a 3D IMAX kind of way into something profound and healing. 

Down 5-2 with 15 minutes to play, the Condors rallied valiantly, scoring three goals in the next 4 1/2 minutes to tie it up. With a little over a minute to play, as Baker left the crease to make a save, the puck rolled off his pads to an Idaho player on the wing with a wide angle shot at an empty net. As the puck slid wide across the open goal mouth, the crowd heaved a collective sigh of relief, the game destined for overtime. 

Which in the West Coast Hockey League means a shootout--five different players from each team, skating in alone on the goalie from center ice. The Steelheads' first shooter, league goal-scoring leader Bobby Stewart was turned away by Baker, who triumphantly thrust his fist in the air, igniting the crowd. Entering the final round of shots, the Condors were up 3-2. But Baker was unable to deny Idaho's Matt Oates, who evened the shootout at 3 apiece, setting up the dramatic finish--a final shot at either a Condor victory, or an even more excruciating Sudden Death shootout. Bakersfield's Aaron Brand skated in and slipped the puck past Idaho goaltender Jason Cugnet. The crowd erupted and the rest of the team rushed the ice, enveloping Baker in a mound of humanity.  

With each passing day, the story of this exciting hockey game deepened. First, when I heard Baker was not merely an athlete, but a writer, profiling his season for an upcoming book. Then, when I discovered he had already written a book outlining an experience remarkably like my own excruciating coming of age.  

A Struggle for Self-Acceptance

The profound shock of seeing my struggle for self-acceptance mirrored in another man, quite different from me, of witnessing his triumph in a place that once symbolized my deepest failure, of seeing reflected in his victory my own, is a powerful moment I will never forget. 

In a bizarre way I can't explain, I feel I know Ken Baker. That somehow, I have shared both in his pain and his victory, and he in mine. Through the maze of activity that is now my life, viewing what he endured shined a light both upon my uneasy past and uncertain future. A subtle inkling swept through me that what I had been through 16 years ago somehow had a purpose, infusing my life with a wisdom I could not have won otherwise. Sharing his triumph, in a town I once despised, that symbolized some of the darkest most confusing days of my life, had shown me I could not have become who I am without such a test. 

A sheepish part of me feels I'm making way too much of this, that its going to come across as a convoluted, twisted narrative that can only end with "I guess you just had to be there". Perhaps the entire episode is distorted through memory and my own emotional filters. But I don't really care. The fact that one event drove similar catharses in the lives of two very different men defies explanation. Yet something deep inside knows embedded in these seemingly random events is an achingly deep resolution for me, and I would venture to guess for him as well.  

Still there is one line I feel unable to cross. While brain tumors are forgivable, in some circles--most notably professional sports--being gay is not. When athletes return after bouts with life threatening diseases, they are feted, celebrated and accorded six-minute standing ovations. It remains to be seen what reception would await the FIRST openly gay professional athlete competing in a major team sport in the United States. 

Moving On Into an Exciting New World

Yet as painful as my Bakersfield years were, as alone as I felt, I have since emerged into a new world. I have played on gay sports teams, won a silver medal in hockey at the Gay Games, been to Dodger and yes, even Raider games with gay friends, and talk daily on the net to a truckload of other wonderful gay guys who know Adam Vinatieri is NOT an Italian designer. I have spent hours and hours on this wonderful site called Outsports, in turn regaled, scandalized and moved. And, for the first time in decades, I have indulged myself with drawings, sketches of athletes, football and baseball gladiators, able to once again revel in every aspect of their heroism, athleticism, and masculinity. 

All things I wouldn't have dreamed of in 1985.  

Ken has moved on as well. After leaving his college hockey days behind, and becoming a correspondent for People and then Us magazines, and growing seriously ill due to his condition, he finally had the brain scan which revealed his tumor. He underwent an operation to remove it. The male hormones flowed like the mighty Mississippi at flood stage. And after 27 years of wandering thirsty in the desert, he got horny. He tasted the promised land, so to speak. He married the woman who stood by him through much of it. He moved on, never to be the same, yet more than he ever was. 

And like me, bringing it full circle, he came to Bakersfield. And as if he were doing it just for me, to punctuate his transformation and mine, he turned away two of five final shots and became a hero. And although I didn't know it at the time, as he was being mobbed on the ice, a massive painful page in both our lives was turning. 

Now things are a bit less charged. Bakersfield not only has a sparkling new arena, but four Starbucks, one a drive-through. The town is no longer the Boo Radley House of my life. Its now the place where I can regress, listening to the guilty pleasures of Van Halen, Boston and Led Zeppelin on the classic rock station without losing my gay card. Its the place where I can chuckle to myself, watching a couple of hulking football lugs in crew cuts wearing Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts. Its the place where I can remember the fun times--breathlessly delivering my high school football story to the tape operator just as the anchor was introducing it--traveling to LA to cover the Rams and Raiders, shooting games from the field, eating the crummy press box food. 

And now, Bakersfield is a place of stories. Not just one painful story that for so long so prominently held sway in my psyche. But a million stories--and one in particular. Another guy, who once had another secret, who moved through it to return to what he most loved, to reclaim the territory that was his all along. Another guy who, by simply moving toward what he knew was true, silenced the screams of a lonely soul.

Rob Schultz'  past includes stints as an architectural designer, sportscaster, and digital effects wizard for motion pictures. He currently earns his keep as a personal and business coach as well as still dabbling in digital art, design and effects. The adventurous can view his work online.

May 9, 2002