Former NBA star John Amaechi to announce he's gay

At last, an NBA player is coming out of the closet. Great! The sports world and American society needs it, even if the olayer is retired. The player is John Amaechi, a former player with the Utah Jazz and Orlando Magic, and he is the first NBA player to come out as gay, according to Outsports.com, which broke the story wide open Monday.
Amaechi will announce publicly for the first time that he is gay on an episode of ESPN's "Outside The Lines" to air Feb. 13. His book, published by ESPN Books, "Man In The Middle," chronicles his NBA career and directly addresses the travails of being a closeted professional athlete. It will be released the following week.

Outsports has been tracking this story for the last year, as quiet rumblings in private conversations started to surface, and had agreed to embargo a story until just prior to his first TV appearance. However, speculation that Amaechi was coming out has become heavy in the past few days, with his publicist, Howard Bragman, dropping hints at a Super Bowl week party in Miami about an NBA player coming out. The publicist had previously handled the coming out of NFL player Esera Tuaolo, golfer Rosie Jones and WNBA superstar Sheryl Swoopes.

Outsports acquired a copy of Amaechi's book last week. They report that Arnaechi writes of his first sexual experience in the United States, and how the Utah Jazz and Salt Lake City, controlled by the Latter Day Saints, was an odd backdrop for what felt like his coming out party. He also acknowledges that those in gay clubs like New York's Splash and Los Angeles' Abbey who have claimed in the past to have spotted him there while he was with the Jazz may, in fact, have done so.
"By the end of my second Utah season, I was practically daring reporters to take the bait and out me," he writes. "But it never happened. My sexuality, I felt, had become an open secret, which was fine by me. I'd left enough open to interpretation that suspicions were gaining momentum."
On the court, Amaechi played in 301 games over five seasons, ending in 2003 with the Utah Jazz. His best seasons were in 1999-2000 and 2000-2001 when he started 89 games for the Orlando Magic. His career high for points came in a 2000 game against Denver, when he scored 31.