Timmy Two Tone

It seems every columnist in North America with 600 words and a job at a newspaper got his or her two cents in on the John Amaechi story that broke last week. Some of it remotely enlightened, few of it better than that, some of it downright mind-boggling.

It took Tim Hardway to trump it all.

Hardaway, the retired point guard formerly of the Miami Heat and Golden State Warriors, did not hold back in his comments on the hot-button topic in sports this week.

"You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known," Hardaway told Dan LeBatard on Sports Talk 790 in Miami on Wednesday afternoon. "I am homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States."

Hardaway's frank comments set off a mild commotion — all things considered — in light of Amaechi's decision to come out of the closet and the inevitable debate that ensued.

Thank goodness he said it.

Now Hardaway gets the public lambasting for being foolish enough to not have an off switch or the common sense to know that what he was saying was likely going to end up getting him in a bit of hot water. (He was also, at the time, doing work for the honourable NBA Cares program, ironically).

Hardaway's comments were as backwater, ignorant and disappointing as you can get but he was the only public figure to come out and actually show the slightest bit of honesty. Across the league, athletes tip-toed around the question choosing to say the diplomatic and politically correct things, the safe answers that hide ignorance and homophobia. Hardaway just voiced what many of them, you have to know, were thinking.

In reality, Hardaway's comments, as deplorable and ugly as they are, arguably do more to advance the discussion than any one else's. Like Borat back-handedly dressing down rednecks.

What's more dangerous than Hardaway: How about LeBron James? The do-gooder poster boy on whom the NBA is hanging all its PR hats, sidestepped the question only to say that he would be angry with a player who didn't admit he was gay in the dressing room because it's a matter of trust.

"With teammates you have to be trustworthy and if you're gay and you're not admitting that you are, then you are not trustworthy," James said, as if the dilemma facing a gay athlete is that simple or that the issue truthfully had anything remotely to do with that.

Hardaway is dragged into the light but James, the 23-year-old 'future' of the NBA, gets a free pass. As does Shavlik Randolph, a serviceable big man from Duke stock, who said "as long as he doesn't bring his gayness on me." The list of people, who said something akin, unfortunately goes on.

Salt Lake Tribune columnist Steve Luhm even got space in his pages to rant about John Amaechi as a basketball player. "Let's be clear about one thing," he began his column. "This isn't about John Amaechi's sexual orientation or his decision to write about being a gay man in the NBA in a soon-to-be-released book. This is about John Amaechi, basketball player with the Utah Jazz from 2001-03."

Luhm attempts to pass his mistimed column off as a critique of Amaechi as a hooper, as if that column would have ever been written again, considering Amaechi ended his career after the 2003 season. The disappointing reality is that column has everything to do with Amaechi's orientation, whether Luhm wants to admit it or not. Why else would you take that privileged space to rant about something so utterly insignificant and obsolete? Four years ago it was about Amaechi as a basketball player. In 2007, it is absolutely about Amaechi the gay man and apparently Luhm isn't fine with it. Unfortunately, he passes that homophobia off as X's and O's analysis.

From LeBron's uneasyness, to Shavlik's queeziness to Luhm's pathetic attempt to fill 100 picas of newspaper space, they're all thin veils over the reality that we're still utterly stuck in the dark ages of tolerance towards sexual orientation.

It's perhaps not surprising that Amaechi — by all accounts a strikingly intelligent, introspective and eloquent man — had the most apt response to Hardaway's mindless outburst.

"Finally, someone who is honest," Meech said. "It is ridiculous, absurb, petty, bigoted and shows a lack of empathy that is gargantuan and unfathomable. But it is honest. And it illustrates the problem better than any of the fuzzy language other people have used so far."

Hardaway, of course, later publicly apologized in a miserable — and completely coreographed — attempt to backtrack. He apologized for saying it, he didn't apologize for what he said.

And nor should he.

If we're supposed to be tolerant — and not just in disguise — then we're all better off for having heard it.