LSU running back Alfred Blue issued an apology late Friday night following anti-gay comments that surfaced in the campus student paper The Daily Reveille.
The article was about the possible inclusion of gay players on the LSU football team and how some players would feel about having homosexual teammates.
Blue was the only player in the article that took a negative approach.
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“Football is supposed to be this violent sport — this aggressive sport that grown men are supposed to play. Ain’t no little boys out here between them lines. So if you gay, we look at you as a sissy. You know? Like, how you going to say you can do what we do and you want a man?”
LSU never questioned the validity of Blue’s statement, but did say the quote was incomplete and taken out of context.
This turned out to be true.
The Daily Reveille posted the full audio of Blue’s quote on the newspaper’s website, in which Blue added a couple sentences after he called gay players “sissys,” including that a teammate’s sexual preference wouldn’t matter if they were “doing their job contributing to help us win a national championship.”
“But like I said, it probably is hard for someone to come out knowing all that goes through somebody’s mind,” Blue said after his initial comment.
Mike Gegenheimer, who wrote the story, also asked a follow-up question: “How do you think this specific LSU locker room would react to someone coming out?”
Blue said the team would accept them and that coach Les Miles would deal with any issues that arose.
“I’m pretty sure coach Miles would sit the team down and talk about the situation and explain to us, even though that’s how he wants to be,” Blue said. “It doesn’t change how he contributes to this team.”
Blue’s comments aren’t exactly welcoming and it doesn’t take away from the fact that he did say, “So if you gay, we look at you as a sissy.” But it does show that he wasn’t completely insensitive and homophobic about the situation.
“I in no way meant to belittle any person’s way of life and feel that everyone deserves a chance to become whatever they want to be,” Blue said in his apology.
“I told the reporter that if any person can help to contribute to the team, then that is the bottom line. I apologize if anyone was hurt by my comments and also to everyone that I may have let down.”
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The Daily Reveille story, which was published Friday, came on the eve of LSU’s spring game and at point where several coaches and athletes — across all sports — are preaching equality and inclusion.
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