"I got my head down, washing my hair, and I look over to the side and I see, like, an extra limb flopping around. "I'm in the shower the first day, and everyone's looking but not looking, ya know?" says an NFL linebacker. One former Tennessee Titan was so poorly endowed that every time he stepped into the shower, teammates would ask him, "Have you pissed on your balls today?" Well-endowed players (sometimes referred to as Hall of Fame members) get it even worse. The team shower, in fact, is one of the few places in our culture where men objectify each other in the cruel manner normally reserved for women. "Then," Davis says, "all the inside shower jokes break out."
This is invariably followed by tense moments of silence and sideways glances until the room busts out in laughter. When former NFL cornerback Wade Davis, the executive director of the LGBT athletes' advocacy group You Can Play, speaks to teams about tolerance inside the locker room, he uses this very reference to break the ice: "Let's just stop with this idea that 'Oh, gay guys are looking at everyone's penises,' because you straight guys - admit it - you all know you're looking too," he tells his audience. In a recent book on masculinity and sports, British sociologist Chris Morriss-Roberts wrote: "The activity of checking out each other occurred irrelevant of sexuality and the type of sport all participants noted that they looked at each other's in the locker room."
In Roman community baths, it was customary for men to stand and applaud when a well-endowed peer entered the water. You could start in Greece - birthplace of the Olympics and the gymnasium (in Greek: "to exercise naked"). Visit any locker room now or throughout history and administer sodium pentothal, and you would find that every player knows exactly which player has the largest, and smallest, penis on the team. Nether-region glancing in showers is so commonplace, according to scores of athletes interviewed for this story, there's even a crude term for when the eyes linger just a tad too long: meat peeping. Without the use of horse blinders, it would be virtually impossible for Vilma, or anyone else, to go more than 20 minutes without a penis, or six, crossing his line of vision. NFL TEAMMATES SPEND at least 20 hours together in the shower each season. And if there's one universal certainty in a sports shower, it's this: Everyone's looking.ĮSPN The Magazine: Accepting Openly Gay Football Playersįormer Division III linebacker Scott Cooper talks about his acceptance in the locker room as an openly gay football player. Getting clean next to a gay teammate is probably one of the more ordinary things that happens in the team shower. "Imagine if he's the guy next to me and, you know, I get dressed, naked, taking a shower, the whole nine," then-Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma said in February. The refrain has always been: I'll accept a gay teammate, I just won't shower with one. When stinky teammates strip down to their most vulnerable state, it conjures, for some, a range of emotions: their most awkward memories (middle school gym class), deepest insecurities (size), purest symbolism (baptism) and most ignorant defense mechanisms (homophobia). But this was unprecedented in an NFL locker room, our culture's ultimate temple of masculinity. Sam wasn't the first, of course: Jason Collins showered with his Nets teammates after coming out last year.
There's just something sacred about the ritual of the team shower, we were told - the outside world would never understand. The barrier that Sam strolled through in June was long considered an unbreakable cultural obstacle to acceptance for gay players, even in a society in which, according to Gallup, 78 percent of people under 30 support same-sex marriage. This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's
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