CARL NASSIB’S SOCIAL TRIUMPH: HE’S JUST ANOTHER DEFENSIVE END

While the Raiders swirl in chaos, the NFL’s first active gay player has blazed a social trail by simply doing his job and gaining acceptance in a tolerant locker room and throughout a grunt sport

     A pro football team, as predicted here and elsewhere, is ravaged by turmoil. Repulsive, derogatory slurs have disrupted the dark season of the Raiders, who are every bit the sports embodiment of Sin City. With every scandalous headline, someone else loses his job. In the league office, Roger Goodell is aghast.

     And none of it, shockingly enough, involves the first active NFL player to come out as gay. In what stands as a proud societal moment amid the horror, crime, dysfunction and racist/anti-gay/misogynistic e-mailings of a psycho autumn in Las Vegas, Carl Nassib is living his life, practicing his craft and contributing the occasional sack to one of the league’s better defenses. By now, you’d figured, Nassib would be peppered each weekend with “faggot,’’ “homo’’ and other such slander within the sport’s fierce trenches, where testosterone flows as freely as trash talk, and inside the Raiders’ locker room, where Nassib dresses and undresses and has showers at his disposal.

     But if an ugly word has been uttered during the season’s first two months, it hasn’t made news. “Not one person, from my point of view, has treated him any different,” quarterback and team leader Derek Carr said. “His locker is just a few down from mine, and I want to make sure that he knows that we just want him to play as hard as he can so we can win a Super Bowl.”

     Any playoff notion is laughable, of course, as the Raiders navigate relentless, unprecedented storms uncommon even by their outrageous standards. Homophobic slurs? Oh, they surfaced, but from the wicked 2011-2018 e-mail attacks of coach Jon Gruden, who criticized Goodell seven years ago for allegedly caving to public pressure and forcing the Rams to draft “queers’’ when the franchise, then in St. Louis, selected the openly gay Michael Sam. After Gruden was dismissed, Nassib could have summoned the media and made sweeping statements about hatred and hypocrisy, considering his coach had saluted him months earlier by saying, “What makes a man different is what makes him great.’’ Rather, Nassib requested a personal day and never commented. His dignity spoke louder than any words.

     “He just said he’s got a lot to process,’’ general manager Mike Mayock said that day. “There’s a lot that’s been going on.’’

     Said teammate Darren Waller: “He’s pretty much a lone wolf when it comes to that. Nobody should be able to tell him how to feel. Nobody should be able to tell him how to grieve. He deserves to take time for himself. Somebody that you’ve been invested in, battled with and you come out and there’s a quote that says something like what was said, I can’t imagine what he must be feeling. And I respect him wanting to take his space and be able to come back clear-headed.”

     Nassib’s silence, as the first prominent male athlete in a major U.S. sport to publicly declare he’s gay, was a way of protecting others who might follow his lead. The less attention Nassib draws to his sexuality and the more he blends in as another football player, the easier it will be for other gay athletes to make brave entrances into team sports, where acceptance and unity are paramount. He doesn’t have to make another tackle this season, and, already, Carl Nassib has won the experiment. He has fit in, without an internal revolt or on-the-field incident, and blazed a trail as just another backup defensive end and special-teams player. It has reached the point where no one asks him about being gay, which represents a monumental triumph in a mostly warped country. Let America rage on about Aaron Rodgers, who somehow was fined only $14,650 by the league for egregiously flouting COVID-19 protocols — lying like a skunk, actually — when he risked the health of teammates, coaches, personnel and their families and could have been suspended.

     Meanwhile, Nassib appears on an infrequent podcast, and the spot barely merits a mention — as it should be. As a guest on “Comeback Stories’’ recently with Waller, he acknowledged an original concern last summer that coming out would end his career.

     “I thought about how I wanted to do it, when I could do it. I didn't know how people would react,’’ he said. “I wanted to make sure I was financially stable before I did it. I didn't know if it would ruin my career. I didn't know if guys would be supportive or not.’’

     He knows now, shedding his original misgivings. “When I decided to come out, it was not easy,’’ Nassib said. “Personally, for my life, I didn't want to do it. But I felt a huge obligation to my community, to all the young kids out there who are struggling with their sexuality. If I could help just a few of them out, then I could sleep better at night.’’

     Nassib sleeps well. Gruden does not. Nor does Henry Ruggs III, the second-year receiver who was frighteningly drunk, with a blood-alcohol level more than twice Nevada’s limit, when he drag-raced his Corvette at 156 mph and slammed into the vehicle of a 23-year-old woman, killing her and her dog in a fireball burst. Nor does Damon Arnette, the 25-year-old cornerback who was waived after a video went viral of him making death threats while brandishing firearms — this amid allegations of a hit-and-run accident last year that injured a woman. Nor does former team president Marc Badain, who resigned with the team’s chief financial officer and controller after Raiders owner Mark Davis found “accounting irregularities,’’ according to The Athletic.

     “We’re dealing with a lot of things this year, that’s for sure,” Carr said in an emotional moment. “A lot of guys, what a crazy year. I heard that a couple times. I heard, ‘Goodness, man, can we please? Nothing more.’ Not for our own sake, but for the sake of everyone else, for everyone involved.”

     Said Waller, who has remained sober in a touching story:  “Personally, it’s definitely blown me back a bit. Coach Gruden was someone who took a risk to bring me in to give me a chance to play football again. And then Henry is somebody everybody liked, not just because he was the fastest person you’ve ever seen run on a field, but he was a good person, a respectful person, somebody you liked being around on a daily basis. It is shocking, and you know it does hurt a little bit, but all we can do is the best we can to move forward and focus on football. Nobody asked for this, but at the same time, as far as training in resilience and adversity, I feel like we’re getting the best practice and training you could possibly get in that. So we just have to keep moving forward."

     In a league battered by a new scandal every week, Nassib is merely part of the background noise. The only controversy was created by someone else, ESPN analyst Ryan Clark, who said this when Nassib sacked and forced Lamar Jackson to fumble in the Raiders’ 33-27 win over Baltimore in Week One: “Why is Nassib running butt-booty naked?"

     Would that have been said about a player who isn’t gay? Turns out it wasn’t even a conversation. Consider that the most important development of this or any football season.

     Jay Mariotti, called “the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he has gravitated by osmosis to film projects.