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Page 1 of 2 Series on Logo will follow gay basketball team the Rock Dogs as they chase a championship
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Bill Kendall has been a good friend of Outsports for many years. I first met him heading to a Stanford-USC game about a decade ago. I found him them, as I do today, to be a unique spirit with a ton of depth to his character and a lot to say.
When he first told us about his Rock Dogs show a couple years ago, he was trying to find a home. He had been a Rock Dog for several years, starting around 2000 and leading up to their gold-medal performance at the 2006 Gay Games in Chicago, after which he retired from the team. He went to several networks and eventually landed it at Logo, who ordered six episodes that were taped this past spring in San Francisco and Chicago. The show will premiere on Logo Sept. 15.
Bill was kind enough to chat with us about his thoughts, plans and hopes for the upcoming show.
Outsports: What was your goal in developing the show?
Bill Kendall: The goal was to faithfully tell the three-generation Rock Dog story. What attracted me to the story was seeing guys from their early 20s to 40s and 50s, who had created sort of a surrogate family, with uncles and brothers and sons. They came together for love of basketball and they stayed together to help each other become those family roles. And I had never seen anything like that growing up. For me, as a Rock Dog through the ’06 Gay Games, it provided me with a lot of insight that it was okay to grow up gay and be an athlete.
OS: Why is the show called Shirts & Skins?
Bill: It’s an old-school sports term that brings up images of basketball that has survived into the new school. Of the many titles that were possible, that was the one that was chosen, as it was most representative of a basketball team that is multigenerational, multicultural, old-school, and new-school. I relate to it as a basketball term. The way audiences may relate to it, or the fact that some of the guys are comfortable not wearing their shirts on a basketball court, those are things I can’t speak to.
OS: Six guys are featured. How did you pick them?
Bill: It was a combination of several things. First, it was the network and the executive producers getting to know the guys and their stories. The second was the players who most prominently feature in the current multicultural generation of the Rock Dogs. And the third was that we asked the guys if they were interested in participating in the show. Some of these guys have full-time jobs or they live out of town. We really wanted to first give the opportunity to the current roster of Rock Dogs who helped win the gold. There were some guys who wanted to be part of the main cast, and some who wouldn’t or couldn’t.
OS: Do you think the show breaks stereotypes, and is that one of your hopes in created the show?
Bill: Definitely. These guys have all been through a lot. They’re survivors. They’re street-smart. You could put them in any format and their truth would show through. So I trusted that. This started out as an independent feature project, and their stories are bigger than what I could fit into in a feature. I’m interested in how those stories evolve over time, especially with the new generation of athlete who comes out younger and doesn’t put themselves in a box. I believe each one of these guys is stereotype-busting in their own unique way. And the fact that they all come together and represent the full gamut of cultures and ages and jobs and politics, I think that’s interesting. So yes, I wanted to bust stereotypes because I think one of the last ceilings is in competitive sports. It’s something that Outsports does very well as well: break down those barriers.
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