Brittney Griner, the Baylor University basketball star who made headlines this spring both when Dallas Mavericks Mark Cuban offered her a tryout to see if she’d be able to play competitively in the National Basketball Association rather than the WNBA—she ultimately signed with the Phoenix Mercury, a women’s team—and then when she confirmed that she’d always been open about her sexual orientation—she is gay—with people who knew her in person, even in Baylor’s observantly Christian environment. Now, in an a pair of interviews with ESPN, Griner explains that even though she was able to be personally out of the closet, the women’s basketball team encouraged her to keep the story from going national during her career:

In a series of interviews — including one on camera Friday — for an ESPN The Magazine and espnW.com story set to hit newsstands later this month, Griner said her silence during college was because Mulkey and her staff were concerned about the program’s image.

“It was more of a unwritten law [to not discuss your sexuality] … it was just kind of, like, one of those things, you know, just don’t do it,” Griner said Friday. “They kind of tried to make it, like, ‘Why put your business out on the street like that?’”

But Griner reiterated on Friday that her sexuality was an open secret at Baylor.

“I told Coach [Mulkey] when she was recruiting me. I was like, ‘I’m gay. I hope that’s not a problem,’ and she told me that it wasn’t,” Griner said. “I mean, my teammates knew, obviously they all knew. Everybody knew about it.”

It’s unfortunate that Baylor basically told Griner that her sexual orientation was no big deal—as long as, by their definition, she didn’t make it that way. And her experience raises interesting questions about what it means for a person to be out of the closet, particularly if their lives are bifurcated between their personal social experiences and a national role.

Baylor’s question, as Griner phrased it, “Why put your business out on the street like that?” speaks to the difference beween so-called tolerance and actual acceptance of LGBTQ people. In the absence of confirmation that someone is gay, they’re assumed to be straight, in part because that’s an assumption that makes people who have little experience with gay people more comfortable. Heterosexuality isn’t “business” that makes anti-gay people uncomfortable to encounter. It’s a neutral default. And because of that assumed neutrality, heterosexuality isn’t something that it’s possible to be “out” about. It’s presumed to be visible even if a theoretically heterosexual person isn’t actually dating someone in a way that publicly confirms their sexual orientation. Heterosexuality can only be disproved. Homosexuality or bisexuality, by contrast, aren’t necessarily visible to a casual observer who chooses not to see the possibility that a figure like Griner could be gay. But that LGBTQ people have to confirm their sexual orientations, at this point, says as much about outsiders who assume they must be straight as it does about LGBTQ people themselves.

And it’s that dynamic that upsets the long-established narrative of coming out particularly for public figures. If Griner was out to her friends, family, and potential partners at Baylor, is the fact that a national audience didn’t know or think that she might be gay on her, or on that audience? Coming out has been framed as a triumphal process, both for the person who finally gets to acknowledge their true identity in public after suffering under pressure to hide, and for people who benefit from the knowledge that there are happy gay people in, say, college sports. But conversely, there’s something frustrating about the idea that Griner, who was out to people who know her in real life already, has to inform a national audience who assumed she was straight by lazy default that, no, actually, she’s gay. It’s great that Griner’s willing to use her experience to educate a national audience about what it’s like for a talented gay woman to coexist with an institution that has openly homophobic statements of principals on its books. But that her experience still seems novel enough to merit news coverage says less about her courage, and more about the lack of imagination of viewers at home who hadn’t bothered to think about Baylor’s treatment of gay and potentially gay players until Griner stepped forward.

Andrew Wiggins, the top-rated high school basketball player in the country and the most hyped teenage talent since Kevin Durant and maybe even LeBron James, will announce where he will spend a single year playing college basketball this afternoon. He has narrowed his choices to four — Kentucky, Kansas, North Carolina, and Florida State — but in the run-up to today’s decision, it seems no one knows where Wiggins is going except Wiggins himself. Rob Fulford, his coach at Huntington Prep in West Virginia jokingly changed his Twitter avatar this week to read “I don’t know where Andrew Wiggins is going.”

Wiggins has eschewed the spotlight since his recruitment began, avoiding interviews and keeping the process to himself and his family. Even today, a kid who could have his own The Decision-type special on ESPN won’t hold a press conference to announce his destination. Instead, there will be a single reporter in the room at a private ceremony with friends, teammates, students, and family at his high school.

That’s a rarity in today’s world of college sports, where recruiting has become a major business. Sites like Rivals.com and Scout.com emerged to rank recruits and assign star values to them. Media outlets from ESPN to the local dailies cover recruiting as fervently as they cover the athletes who are already on campus. Recruits now announce their decisions in made-for-TV press conferences, a row of hats with logos of their final few schools lining a tabletop in front of them. An athlete like Andrew Wiggins has more than 75,000 Twitter followers (at this writing), a world in which fan blogs parse his every word for a hint of where he may play college ball. And high school athletes who don’t even receive scholarship offers hold fake press conferences to announce that they’ll play football or basketball for a coach they’ve never actually talked to — all for a moment in the sun.

That’s a culture Andrew Wiggins apparently wants no part of. While his treatment of his choice has drawn criticism from fans who want to know where he is going and cynics who think he put off his decision until the last moment simply to draw attention, it’s ultimately a refreshing approach.
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Brittney Griner, the former Baylor University basketball star who this week became the top overall pick in the WNBA Draft, came out in a recent interview as already openly gay. Griner hadn’t been asked publicly about her sexuality before, but she told both USA Today and ESPN that she had been openly gay during her Baylor career.

Despite the public perception that female athletes are more likely to be gay, it isn’t always easy for women to be open about their sexuality in sports. Griner faced issues on that front too, both because of her sexuality and her looks, but being an openly gay athlete “wasn’t too difficult,” she said in different interviews this week:

“It was hard, just being picked on for being different, just being bigger, my sexuality, everything,” she said. “I overcame it and got over it. Definitely something that I am very passionate about. I want to work with kids and bring recognition to the problem, especially with the LGBT community.” [...]

“It really wasn’t too difficult, I wouldn’t say I was hiding or anything like that,” Griner said. “I’ve always been open about who I am and my sexuality. So, it wasn’t hard at all. If I can show that I’m out and I’m fine and everything’s OK, then hopefully the younger generation will definitely feel the same way.”

What makes this more remarkable, though, is that Griner was open about her sexuality at Baylor, a university that has been a bastion of homophobia. Baylor, after all, is a Baptist university in the heart of Texas, a school that in 2004 stripped an openly gay student of his scholarship and, as recently as 2011, offered a course suggesting homosexuality was a “gateway drug” and banned openly gay men and women from serving on its faculty. Its president is Kenneth Starr, who defended California’s anti-marriage equality Proposition 8 in front of the state Supreme Court, and it has for years refused to officially recognize gay rights student groups.

And yet, when its star basketball player and one of the faces of its university happens to be gay, the school was remarkably silent. That Griner is gay wasn’t widely known, though the fact that she wasn’t “hiding or anything like that” would suggest that it was because no one in the media bothered to ask and not because she didn’t feel like she could speak out about it while playing for Baylor (Baylor coach Kim Mulkey recently dismissed questions about players’ sexuality, saying, “I don’t think it’s anybody’s business.”).

Perhaps that’s a sign that Baylor’s stance has moderated, if only slightly. Or perhaps — and this scenario seems more likely — the school overlooked Griner’s sexuality because she was a talented basketball player who was among the athletes bringing positive attention to a university that has been the face of scandal in the sports world. Either way, Griner is committed to helping other young women realize that who they are is nothing to hide. And hopefully, as she continues to bring attention to her alma mater as she moves up the basketball ladder, her success will also help the people running Baylor realize that its OK to accept people as they are even if they don’t possess otherworldly skills on the basketball court.

The Wall Street Journal’s Dennis K. Berman wrote a piece this week comparing the basketball programs at the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville. Kentucky coach John Calipari, as Berman notes, built his program on the backs of players who spend one mandated year in college before jumping to the NBA. Louisville coach Rick Pitino, by contrast, built his with players who are more likely to stick around for the full four years. The implication from Berman is that Kentucky’s program is “hollow” like the Death Star, while Louisville’s is built in the manner that most fans and basketball observers would consider the “right way.”

My observation is quite different: to me, there is no college basketball program in America that epitomizes the problems with college sports better than the Louisville Cardinals.

Louisville’s basketball program is by far the richest in the nation. Thanks in large part to a beautiful new publicly-financed arena that has sent its revenues through the roof, the program hauled in more than $40 million in revenue last year. It made anywhere between $23 million to $28 million in profits, far more than any other school. The young men who helped generate those profits, who 21,000 fans pack the KFC Yum! Center to see play? They were paid nothing, even though a 2011 study calculated the market value of a Louisville basketball player at just short of $1 million.

It’s not that Louisville doesn’t have the money to compensate athletes. Pitino made $4.8 million this year; with bonuses, he made $7.5 million in 2011. The athletic department, bolstered in part by basketball revenue and in part by its successful football program, is expanding athletic facilities at rapid rates. In 2008, it relied on a $10 million donation and state financing to make a $72 million upgrade to its football stadium.

Louisville has perfected college basketball’s revenue-maximizing system, raking in millions of dollars in profits from advertisers, ticket and merchandise sales, and television deals, then paying out millions to coaches and administrators and pretending that what it is doing is somehow not a business but an educational mission. This isn’t just a Louisville problem: it’s what schools across the country are doing. Revenues are rising rapidly, and they are going to pay skyrocketing salaries for coaches and to build new facilities or upgrade those that already exist. At none of these schools is the athlete sharing in the system.

Kentucky (which is my alma mater) is no exception. Its $19.9 million in projected basketball profits tied it with Kansas and North Carolina as college basketball’s second-richest programs, and at $4.5 million a year, Calipari’s salary is roughly equal to Pitino’s. It has a sparkling $30 million practice facility and recently spent $6 million to upgrade the scoreboard and sound system in its football stadium. The market value of Kentucky players is more than $645,000. It, like Louisville and every other NCAA program, doesn’t pay its players either.

But here’s the thing about Kentucky: intentionally or not, it has blown a hole in the idea that college basketball is a virtuous educational endeavor pursued solely by amateurs who love the game. Calipari’s program more than any other takes advantage of the fact that college basketball is a minor league business for the NBA by understanding that the most talented basketball players are using college to get to the pros as fast as possible. If Kentucky’s players can’t share in the riches they generate for Kentucky, they’ll at least be getting paid for their work soon enough. That’s far from an ideal setup and hardly excuses Kentucky from scrutiny, but it at least halfway acknowledges and exploits the flaws in the argument that the top levels of college basketball are anything other than a business. Because it does that, the program is a slap in the face to purists, right way-ers, and the “amateurism and education crowd” that hasn’t updated its views to fit reality.

Major college sports operate in a perverse system that generates billions of dollars a year off the backs of free labor, and both Kentucky and Louisville are willing participants. But if no basketball program does a better job of making the system look ridiculous than Kentucky, perhaps no basketball program is right now doing a better job of epitomizing the lies on which that system is built than Louisville.