Book Review: The David Kopay Story

By Al Preston

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        When I was a kid, I played soccer until my lungs gave out to asthma. For a very brief moment, I considered volleyball after that but never followed through. When I was very small, I played Coach Pitch (which we jokingly called Machine Pitch because it was rarely our couch tossing the ball) for a short time.

        Nothing ever stuck, nor did I ever actually understand the games I played. I understand the basic rules, but anything more complicated or complex flew right over my head. I grew up watching the Pittsburgh Penguins and had the rules explained to me many times. I still don’t fully understand hockey.

        Once asthma kicked in, I rapidly fell into the category of people who, more or less, despised sports. I really didn’t enjoy the sports I played to begin with. I’m not a competitive person and sports and exercise have never made me feel good like most people claim that they do. My mother often said that exercise was “punishment for living,” which really didn’t help. She was very determined to exercise, however. My entire childhood, she walked and jogged our neighborhood until she could run the entire thing, including a massive hill. My mother had much more determination than me.

        I say all of this because The David Kopay Story: An Extraordinary Self-revelation by David Kopay and Perry Deane Young is about far more than a gay football player. David Kopay was a pro-football player who also happens to be gay. He wanted to write about his experience as a gay man who never once matched the gay stereotype and was within the most masculine profession; professional sports.

        However, as I said, there is more to Kopay’s book. A theme Kopay wanted to hit at as well was that there was more to pro-athletes than their sport. Including dismissing the ‘meathead’ stereotype. Which, I must confess, I also believed even going into this book.

        Once I decided that sports weren’t for me, I stopped paying attention and caring about them. As much as I understand how culturally significant sports are, I just can’t bring myself to care about them and for a good portion of my schooling, athletes were meatheads. Student athletes cared only enough to maintain their GPA they needed to keep doing their sport. Not that my high school was good at enforcing that rule. My undergraduate college wasn’t much better. Many of the athletes thought that a history major would be an easy A and when it wasn’t, switched majors.

        I know looks are deceiving and being good at sports does not automatically mean someone is less intelligent in other areas. Sports are difficult and require a lot of strategy. Unfortunately, they are not helped by schools who care more about their ability to score than their ability to take a test. However, I was still nervous to start this book. I was worried about my lack of sports related education. I also worried that the writing would make this a difficult read.

I was wrong and need to check my own biases.

This book was an extremely engaging, thoughtful, and interesting read. Not only about queerness in professional sports but also the world of professional sports itself. Kopay is also a historian, and it really came through in his sections of the book. Not only is he well read, but the way he could be introspective about the football league and the history of athlete stereotypes shows his ability to do historical thinking.

I was quick to judge and I’m glad Kopay was quick to correct me.

While this book does have a co-author, he serves as the transcriber of Kopay’s oral account of his life. He also provides context for Kopay’s words for those who do not know much about sports much like the co-author, Young, himself.

Pro-sports is a damaging world…and I know that seems counter to what I was just talking about, but this was another theme of Kopay’s book. Athletes, specifically male ones, are treated like objects, machines. If the machine doesn’t work exactly as the coaches wanted or does not act out white masculinity well enough, it would be replaced without thought or consideration that ‘it’ wasn’t a machine at all.

Kopay, twice, was told he was on a team’s roster before being unceremoniously kicked out at the last second.

Kopay spoke at length about the pressure he and other players were put under to perform perfectly. How their masculinity was under constant scrutiny and insulted, sometimes because they once fumbled only one pass in an otherwise great game. Additionally, while Kopay does not dive into it fully, he was clearly aware and good at acknowledging the racism that black players faced that made an already toxic environment worse for them specifically.

Kopay is very thoughtful about all of the things professional sports did to him, but his co-author, Young, was the one to hint at Kopay’s anger issues. Specifically, of those issues being a result of his time in professional sports. Players were encouraged to be angry and react to anxiety and self-worth with anger.

Thankfully, Kopay was a decent person who tried to never hurt anyone with that anger off the field. He insisted to everyone, even other players, that they could control themselves and nothing about their anger or occupation as pro-athletes, made hurting others right.

He was a man ahead of his time, and thus far, the only pro-football player to publicly come out as a gay man under his full name by choice. He believed that sports and the world at large needed to acknowledge that gay people were everywhere, in every profession—they were just people.

In his journey to accept his own queerness, Kopay struggled with the gay stereotype. He wasn’t flamboyant, nor was he a predator of young boys. He was your typical all-American football player. He was just a man who happened to prefer sex and romance with other men.

This isn’t a bad thing, although, I do have my suspicions that such beliefs and rhetoric came from perceived notions, stereotypes, and culture. Regardless, it was really nice to read someone who seemed to view romance and sex similarly to myself, as these related things, but not necessarily mutually exclusive.

The version I read was a reprint from 1988, which added a ‘ten years later’ chapter to the end of the book. Kopay only briefly talks about those he lost to AIDS, and the talk shows he went on, defending himself as a well-adjusted gay man who was no more a tragic figure than the interviewer themselves.

Kopay defied stereotypes in every way, and that is a lesson everyone should learn. I highly recommend this book to anyone. It has a little something for everyone and is a real eye opener for queerness and the sports world.