With the 249th Pick . . .: Michael Sam and Imagining Failure Otherwise

Sam, Sports Culture, and The Queer Art of Failure

In The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam works to dismantle and reimagine the “logics of success and failure with which we currently live” to better understand what kind of rewards can be offered by failure (p. 2). While Halberstam offers up readings of failure both as a way of being in the world and as an unbeing that proposes a “different relation to knowledge” (p. 23), the manuscript, which examines a range of artifacts from what Halberstam argues is a “silly archive,” might not seem to lend itself immediately to the world of sports. One might be quick to point out that Halberstam’s only mention of sports within the book is through an engagement with the artwork of Tracy Moffat. Moffat, a photographer who chronicled the fourth-place finishes of athletes at the 2000 Olympic games in Sydney, is utilized to show how a refocusing on the “images of brilliant athletes who didn’t make it” can work in powerful ways to counteract the mainstream media’s focus on “the triumphant spectacle of winning” (Moffett cited in Halberstam, 2011, p. 93). But it is this refocusing of failure as success, or at least the necessity to think contemplatively about what success looks like for queer folk, that offers us a starting point for a discussion of sports and queered failure. That if we are to understand “success” as culturally constructed, as unavailable in equal amounts to all individuals, then we are also able to understand the term as capable of being reconstructed in ways that might be more universally accessible.

So, while sports and sports culture might seem a far way away from Halberstam’s art and film-centric artifacts, they are, in many ways, representative of the worlds described in Halberstam’s manuscript: archives and artifacts that make the case for the importance of low theory and “silly archives.” Within the world of cultural studies, a return to sports, an entertainment form directly oriented toward a mass audience, speaks to the importance of ordinary cultural moments so seminal to the field (Williams, 2003). In addition, as the following will argue, sports/media discourses are intimately tied to relations of power that influence practices of living and yet their cultural meaning is complicated, contradictory, and contested. An ability to recognize and interrogate the socially constructed “links” that legislate and make legible lived realities points us toward a better understanding of how sports and sports culture contribute to mass understandings of identity, success, and many other traits concomitant to life. Here, I draw upon Stuart Hall’s notions of articulations as a way to connect seemingly disparate spaces of sports, LGBT identity, and queer theory. In Hall’s (1980) estimation, the idea of articulation “has the considerable advantage of enabling us to think of how specific practices articulated around contradictions which do not all arise in the same way, at the same point, in the same moment, can nevertheless be thought together.” (p. 69). Through the case of Michael Sam, an individual whose body presents contradictions for how we conceive of success, race, and sexuality within sports culture, we are better able to see how these inconsistencies might authorize, rather than foreclose, new frameworks of understanding.

Halberstam’s arguments are also heavily influenced by the work of queer theorist Muñoz (2009) who writes that “queer cultural workers are able to detect an opening and indeterminacy in what for many people is a locked-down dead commodity” (p. 9) and it would be hard to argue that for many, sports, and the NFL in particular, is the epitome of a modern day hegemonic commodity. This can be seen in its reliance on tropes of masculine dominance in both physical manifestations (e.g., Holstein, Jones, & Koonce, 2015; Messner, 1990; Morrison & Casper, 2017; Young, 2012, among others) and symbolic displays (e.g., Boyle & Haynes, 2009; Messner et al., 1999) and in its overt connections to corporate sponsorships and capitalism (e.g., Andrews, 2009; Oriard, 2007; Smart, 2007, among others), and ideologies of patriotism, militarization, and war (Butterworth, 2014, 2017; End, Kretschmar, Campbell, Mueller, & Dietz-Uhler, 2003; Jansen & Sabo, 1994; King, 2008). And, as academics have argued, the media plays an integral role in relying on these discourses of masculinity to reaffirm myths of male dominance (Whannel, 2002). For Halberstam, “failure presents an opportunity rather than a dead end” (p. 96) and it is this conception of failure as a potentiality, along with its connection to the writings of Muñoz, that I use to examine discourses of Michael Sam’s short-lived professional football career.

While much emphasis was placed on Sam’s draft stock, his ability to make a team, and his chance to make good on the promise to change sports forever, this narrative ignores the way in which his experience can show a queered version of success that is not related to traditional understandings of the term. Rather, that his story, like the story of many queer folk, “is a little ray of sunshine that produces shade and light in equal measure and knows that the meaning of one always depends upon the meaning of the other” (Halberstam, p. 5). ⁴ There is a messiness to Sam’s story that media narratives attempt to explain, rather than to understand, and they often ignore the fact that queerness, just like life, is messy. Instead of thinking of Michael Sam as an irrecuperable failure, this article asks how we can think of Sam as a failure that allows us to undo narratives of success that are only available to heterosexuals, that the conversation of Sam, of sports and sexuality, and of failure should not begin and end with an individual body but necessitates a more expansive interrogation of the structural and institutional values inherent to sports culture that predispose some to fail and some to succeed.

The Eagle’s Precarious Landing

On February 10, 2014, ESPN, in conjunction with the New York Times, released an interview with Michael Sam as a stand-alone extension of their Outside the Lines program. The news was quickly picked up by mainstream media outlets, despite competing with the Winter Olympics for sports-related airtime, and became a topic of conversation that reached far beyond sports media circles: Sam even received a tweet of support from then President Barack Obama (Lavender, 2014). While a relatively unknown player until his breakout senior year, in which he led his football team to the Southeastern Conference (SEC) Championship game, Sam quickly became a household name because of his announcement that he was a gay man (Connelly, 2014). The statement, which was carefully choreographed by the aforementioned media outlets, was arranged by Sam’s agents, Empire Agency, and his advisors, which included publicist Howard Bragman, who specializes in the “coming out” of celebrities; Journalists Cyd Zeigler and Jim Buzinski; the cofounders of the LGBT sports website Outsports.com; and former gay football players such as Wade Davis. ⁵ Zeigler (2014) documented this process in an article titled “The Eagle Has Landed.” Sam made his announcement after his senior season at the University of Missouri, but before his “official” tryout at the NFL’s combine, where potential players are evaluated based on both their performance in skills drills and their ability to navigate an interview session with potential teams, before teams make their official selection at the NFL draft. ⁶

I begin with a discussion of the NFL draft to elucidate how ideas of neoliberalism and evaluation run throughout discussions of Sam’s story. His “coming out” was rationalized as an opportunity for Sam to take control of his narrative, though I argue that this strategy relies on notions of personal responsibility intrinsic to neoliberalism. The draft also provides for a useful backdrop to think through how seemingly neutral evaluations of players are also intimately tied to heteronormative frameworks of success and failure.

In hindsight, many have questioned why Sam would announce his sexuality prior to the combine and before he was officially on a roster; however, Zeigler explained that although the original plan was that “the story would break right after the NFL Combine . . . the timing, however, would quickly change” because every day it became more apparent that too many people knew what was coming and ESPN and the New York Times, along with Sam’s PR representative Bragman, did not want the story to be scooped (Zeigler, 2014). This discourse of announcements, of the breaking of news, and the potential scooping of the story is interesting because it both includes and obviates Sam’s agency and voice in the decision to discuss his sexuality. As Sam stated in the official announcement, “I’m coming out because I want to own my truth. I’m comfortable with who I am and I didn’t want anyone to break a story . . . without me telling it the way I want to tell it” (Sam, 2014). This sentiment was previously identified by Jason Collins, a member of the National Basketball Association who “came out” in 2013 and wrote, “my coming out is preemptive. I shouldn’t have to live under the threat of being outed. The announcement should be mine to make, not TMZ’s” (Collins, 2013). Despite Ziegler’s later admission that many decisions were made because of their economic ramifications, self-vocalization by Sam became the most important part of his “coming out” narrative. He wanted to announce his sexuality to control the narrative. This is important because it uses the logic of neoliberal personal responsibility (it is up to ME to tell my story) to mystify the economic forces and systems that benefit from an athlete’s “coming out.”

While the history, politics, and morals of “outing” are long and complicated (e.g., Gross, 1993; Signorile, 1993, among others), previous theorizing has generally reserved forced “outings” only for individuals who actively work against the rights and liberties of the LGBT community while engaging in sexual acts or relationships that would equate them with those very same members of society they seek to disempower and suppress. Similarly, more recent research on “outing” in sports culture revealed that sports writers are generally wary of discussing sexuality with regard to athletes who are rumored to be gay, even if this means the story could be “scooped” by competitors (Kian, Anderson, & Shipka, 2015). ⁷ However, what is lost in this estimation of self-vocalization is the “after” of “coming out” as ideologies of “coming out” often overimagine the process as a mediating event that separates previously untruthful lives with postout generative experiences. ⁸ While Sam “came out” to control his narrative, a focus on the discourses that sprang from his announcement and his quest to make an NFL roster show that his ability to control when and where his sexuality would be discussed ended with the announcement. In this estimation, “coming out”

works as performative language by cultivating a set of meanings and practices that circulate around the social experience of “coming out” to not only make it appear to be natural, but also as an announcement that brings ephemeral, theoretical, and/or fluid identity into static being. (Brody, 2016, p. 29)

However, the ability to “come out” is contingent upon one’s relationship to normative values of race, gender, and class, to name a few identities. ⁹ This has particular ramifications for Sam, as Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr. (2017) argues, because “blackness recalibrates the rewards of queerness; marking queerness as a space of limited possibilities when performed in black bodies” (p. 210). Sam’s sexuality became the focal point of his story, rather than a part of it, even within contexts that would previously be configured as separate from “personal”/off-the-field narratives.

So, while “coming out” is posited as a way for LGBT athletes to take personal responsibility, to speak their truth and control their narrative, Sam’s experience shows that the “coming out” narrative, as a form of taxonomic knowledge production, allows for normative society to identify and highlight the sexual difference of “out” athletes: It makes hypervisible the negative potentials of their transgressive bodies. ¹⁰ In addition, it reminds us that just as “coming out” is an attempt to control and contain what is otherwise a continual, and often messy, process, as opposed to a singular solitary moment, so too was Sam and his advisor’s choreographing of his narrative an attempt to manage a story that is often uncontrollable in the public sphere.

This idea also has further ramifications as it relates to the double bind of LGBT identification and representation. Little discussion of Sam’s story interrogated the way in which his “coming out,” while originally situated as a way for Sam to tell his story, actually contributed to the over-spectacularization of his narrative as “coming out” is promoted throughout culture, and in particular by LGBT sports nonprofits and LGBT sports journalists and sports organization employees, as a necessary act that facilitates change and alters hearts and minds (Brody, 2016, pp. 133-135). “Coming out,” within sports culture, is vaunted as the best way for LGBT individuals to counteract homophobic institutions and ideologies while criticized as an attention grab that distracts from the team ethos of many sports and calls too much attention to the individual player. The visibility produced through the “coming out” narrative necessitates that individuals be responsible for creating a visible and authentic notion of “truth” while cultivating ideas that the individual should not take precedence over the team mentality of sports culture. However, this approach to “coming out,” one that imagines the liberation of the closet as a moment of unabashed truth production, fails to acknowledge or attend to the realities faced by African Americans who must “uncloset their sexuality within the context” of an already disadvantaged and visibly marked status (Ross, 2005, p. 183; for more on this, see Moscowitz, Billings, Ejaz, & O’Boyle, 2018).

While Sam was not technically an official employee of the NFL at the time he made the announcement, he was projected to be selected somewhere between the second and fifth rounds of the draft in May based on his All-American performance at Missouri where he was named the SEC co-defensive player of the year his senior season. This designation is important to note because from 2003 to 2013 (the year Sam won the honor) there were 13 recipients of the award, including Sam. ¹¹ For the other 12 players, all but two were selected in the first round of the draft with their average draft position at 23. ¹² There were 256 selections made in the NFL draft in 2014 and Sam was drafted in the final round (seventh) at position #249, meaning only seven players were drafted after him. Players selected this late in the draft rarely make the final roster for teams and the final selection of the draft is, in fact, given the designation of “Mr. Irrelevant.”

Prior to Sam’s announcement, CBS Sports predicted that he would be drafted at position #90 and, after he came out, they adjusted this position to #160 (Schwab, 2014). ¹³ There were now, according to CBS Sports, 70 players who were better prospects for the NFL, not because of their athletic ability, but because of their sexual orientation. While a detailed account of draft positions and assessments might not seem salient to a discussion of queerness and failure, analyses of Sam’s inability to succeed in the NFL often ignored the way in which his sexual orientation, or rather the public recognition of his sexual orientation, affected the evaluation of his potential. In CBS Sports’ eyes, the mere announcement of his homosexuality was enough to inhibit his potential significantly; however, in this estimation, potential is seen only within a heteronormative framework. While calling attention to the ways in which value is structured toward heterosexual positionalities is significant to any discussion of Sam’s supposed ability to succeed or fail, acknowledging the contingent nature of success also has ramifications within a queered vision of what success could be, or alternatively, what failure might produce in moments when normative success is unavailable.

An attention to the draft is also important for understanding how heteronormative values which altered quantitative assessments of Sam served to both connect the NFL to a moment of seemingly progressive social change while also providing cover from potential future criticism. Mike Kensil, the NFL’s vice president for game operations, was chosen to announce the Rams’ selection. After the draft, he recalled that “it was somewhat overwhelming to walk out [to the lectern]. I really felt like I was part of NFL history” (Rhoden, 2014). Media outlets recognized the significance of the moment as well, such as Grantland’s Bill Barnwell (2014) who wrote, “it immediately produced the most important and meaningful minute in the history of draft coverage on television.” In addition, Sam was selected by the NFL as one of the 10 draftees to be featured on their commemorative draft coins. By insuring that Sam was drafted at some point, and by having the pick announced by a member of the governing organization rather than someone associated with the individual team, the NFL was able to promote and assert their connection to this fleeting moment of LGBT equality. ¹⁴ However, his low draft position has also been used simultaneously as preemptive justification for an unremarkable career (Domenech, 2014) and as evidence to support his eventual inability to make the Rams’ opening day roster (Botelho, 2014). As history shows, being drafted is no guarantee that a player will make a final roster. But this caveat has different ramifications based on when the player is selected. In the previous 10 years leading up to the 2014 draft, players selected in the first four rounds had anywhere from a 99.7% chance of making the final roster (players selected in the first round) to a 91.4% chance (players selected in the fourth round). This number drops significantly to only 58.3% for players selected, like Sam, in the seventh round (Doll, 2014). ¹⁵ But while Sam’s chances of making a team were severely altered by his draft spot, the extraordinariness of his narrative, through the spectacularization of his sexuality, had already shifted his story from that of a common fate. As one sports writer noted, “Michael Sam is an unexceptional prospect doing something exceptional. Ideally, the exceptional will someday become the ordinary” (Tanier, 2014). ¹⁶ Although his narrative was constructed in exceptional ways before the draft, the reality of his draft position necessitates that he should, in actuality, be read within common terms. But in a culture that is unable to see failure as success, once one steps into the narrative of the exceptional any attempt to reassert them into a common narrative exposes the restrictive nature of normative ideologies of success.

Alternatively, Muñoz’s (2009) reading of dancer Fred Herko, an artist whom he argues built a career on reminding “queers that indeed they always live out of step with straight time” provides an alternative version of potential and success: one that incorporates nonnormative bodies (p. 149). Muñoz uses the failures of Herko’s career to argue for queer potentiality as “doing something else” (p. 154) comparative to the privileged heteronormativity of success. Here again, we might use this reading of failure to think of the alternatives produced by Sam; of the ways in which his failure might remind us that the seemingly data-driven and impartial evaluations of sports figures are actually intimately tied to subjective appraisals that are dependent on traditional values, perceived economic viability, and notions of hegemonic masculinity. Despite Richard Attias’s oft-cited claim, in a discussion of gender equity in athletics, that “sport is the great equalizer that can build bridges, transcend borders and cultures, and render even the fiercest conflicts temporarily irrelevant,” the case of Michael Sam proves otherwise (Attias, 2012). One can transcend as long as one does not transgress.

In addition, a further examination of Herko’s actual aesthetic work, rife with quotidian gestures queered and made worthy of staging, furthers the claim that queer acts should not be goal oriented, but rather should be buoyed by their incompleteness and promise to another time and place. As the draft predictions elucidate, Sam’s promise could only be seen within seemingly pragmatic understandings of the term. Sam’s viability is based, in theory, on his athletic performance, but in reality, on the way in which his athletic ability is read through his sexuality. Through this lens, we are able to see how this valuation of Sam, a seemingly quantifiable entity, in fact highlights that Sam’s ability rested as much on his ability to perform the correct type of sexuality as it did on any metric of sports ability. If we are to queer Sam’s failure in much the same way we might Herko’s, we could see his story as worthy of examination because of the way in which its incompleteness forces us to attend to the larger institutional and structural forces which conceal homophobic qualities of sports culture as seemingly neutral evaluations. Sam’s failure is productive in reminding us of the work still left to do. ¹⁷

To Be or Not To Be . . . Distracted?

Although the draft became the most visible mediation of Sam’s journey, descriptions of his attempt to actually make an opening day roster elucidate further narratives of personal responsibility, distraction, and the problematic binary of success and failure. They bring to the forefront the ways in which distraction becomes a bivalent descriptor intimately tied to personal evaluations of sexuality and race. But they also provide a space for thinking about how queered discussions of Sam’s failure can open up a critical territory for imagining a more expansive and inclusive arena.

Despite the aforementioned accolades, postmortem media discussions regarding “what happened with Sam” focused on his experience as a failure. While this narrative of failure and distraction is evident in multiple reports (e.g., Kaufman, 2014; King, 2014; Myers, 2014; Page, 2016; Timmel, 2015), it gained the most traction in the writing of Kate Fagan, a prominent sports reporter for espnW and ESPN. ¹⁸ Fagan is an important and influential journalist as she was widely promoted as one of ESPN’s go-to reporters for discussions of sports and the LGBT community. ¹⁹ In addition to being a former collegiate athlete and beat writer for the Philadelphia 76ers, Fagan is a prominent lesbian figure within the world of sports media and often served as the fill-in anchor for ESPN’s only program dedicated to social issues connected to the sports world, Outside the Lines.

There are many ways to interrogate the failure of Sam to make good on his promise to America to become the first openly gay man to play in the NFL and, while it is not my intention to privilege one point of analysis over the other, I do want to call attention to the way that Fagan, as one of the authoritative LGBT voices for ESPN and the sports media complex, framed Sam’s experience as a moment of individual failure. Her article, “Michael Sam Needed To Put All His Focus On Football To Succeed On The Field” (Fagan, 2015), uses the language of personal responsibility and individual failure to explain the complex array of economic, social, and structural forces that coalesced to produce Sam, not as a pioneer in the gay rights movement, but rather as a cautionary tale of activism and athleticism gone wrong. ²⁰

Unsurprisingly, she begins her article by invoking the body of Sam, both literally and metaphorically, as an isolated figure for cultural change. She writes, “Michael Sam was supposed to be a change-maker, a trailblazer, a 260-pound hulk of a man who would tear down stereotypes and anything else that got in his way. In his wake, so many others were going to walk” (Fagan, 2015 1=). In this estimation, Sam, as the epitome of masculinity and millennial promise, became the body on which the LGBT community was supposed to stake its future. ²¹ Fagan’s description poses risks in both its reliance on a particular racialized body politics and the language of neoliberalism. Configuring Sam’s body as the signifier of brute strength works in the service of racist cultural practices related to Black bodies. Her description brings to the forefront a historical phenomenon of signifying, through cultural narratives, African American men as ruled by “brute strength and natural instincts, characteristics that allegedly fostered deviant behaviors of promiscuity and violence” (Hill-Collins, 2012, p. 320). This enactment of race through the gaze is also important in how Sam’s nonnormative sexuality configures into the discussion. As Morrison and Casper (2017) argue, Black male bodies “are read as both menacingly powerful and hyper-sexualized on the playing field while simultaneously dangerous and undesirable on the street” (p. 169). But these are readings that assume a heterosexual self. In Sam’s case, the physical strength, aggressiveness, and sexuality that can often generate admiration for athletes was unavailable to him because of his homosexuality.

As Fagan (2015) further writes, “Sam was supposed to clarify things: He would get drafted, make a roster and contribute every Sunday.” He had “come out,” the hard work of gay identification supposedly accomplished, and now all viewers needed to do was sit back and watch as the heteronormative world of sports was brought crumbling to its knees. While Fagan spends the majority of her article providing examples as to how Sam either did not work hard enough or did not work hard enough in the right way, she glosses over institutional or structural frameworks that reduced his chances for success. Here, Fagan runs into the trap of both neoliberalism and respectability politics. The former I engage with in detail below and the latter speaks to ideologies which require marginalized groups to “behave better” and to police themselves to receive improved treatment from superordinate groups. Here, the assumption is that Sam did not deliver on his promise to break down barriers because his mental and physical preparation were not adequately disciplined. ²²

Also relevant to this discussion is the way in which Sam’s failure is configured in neoliberal terms. The concept of neoliberalism, which relies on the language of personal responsibility, furthers an ethos that ignores structural inequalities and bias as the expectation for change is placed on the individual while ignoring constraints driven by economics and rationalized by seemingly neutral and quantifiable traits. ²³ For example, Fagan does not mention how speculative draft predictions, produced by individual analysts and sanctioned by corporate sports organizations, dropped his draft potential at the mere admission of his gay identity. She ignores reporting that quotes players, front-office personnel, and/or football analysts, who admitted that the NFL might just not want to deal with the “distraction” of an openly gay player (Petchesky, 2014). And she does not engage with the circuitousness of the term distraction itself, situated as such by Abraham Iqbal Khan (2017), as the excessive media coverage of Sam’s story, primarily by organizations such as ESPN, obscures the ways in which media organizations are some of the main instigators of the “distraction” they purport to cover (p. 334). ²⁴

Furthermore, the negative aspects of “distraction” are assigned to Sam himself, who is seen by journalists such as Jason Page (2016), a gay sports radio host and contributor to NBC news, as either the architect or at least a willing participant, in the media craze that accompanied his announcement. Despite Sam’s request at the NFL combine for reporters to see him “as Michael Sam the football player, instead of Michael Sam the gay football player” sports outlets continued to cover his sexuality as much, if not more than, his athletic ability (Kang, 2014). Again, we see how individual action and personal responsibility is positioned as a way for LGBT individuals to counteract homophobic culture, and yet this emphasis on personal responsibility ignores the ways in which it forces LGBT individuals to uphold neoliberal power structures that favor economics over individuals. ²⁵ Neoliberalism, in this estimation, works to disarticulate social issues from economic ones, as “neoliberal advocacy, of course, is defined as the nonpolitical exclusion of ‘issues of class, race and gender’” (Duggan, 2003, p. 55). However, neoliberalism has profound effects on social formations, in particular through its emphasis on the individual and personal responsibility, as one’s relationship to the economic is also understood as a personal obligation devoid of any extenuating circumstances or impediments such as institutionalized power dynamics that privilege certain classes of people over others.

Within cultural formations of neoliberalism, the individual is responsible and accountable for their own actions and well-being. While neoliberal ideologies stress that individuals make choices, they do not critically engage with what “choice” actually means. Put another way, although individuals do make choices in everyday life, the frameworks that guide these choices are rarely made in circumstances of their own making, but rather within conditions that are shaped by a small number of people who benefit most from the economic and social conditions of neoliberalism. However, as David Harvey (2005) argues, “individual success or failure are interpreted in terms of entrepreneurial virtues or personal failings rather than being attributed to any systemic property (such as the class exclusions usually attributed to capitalism)” (pp. 65-66). It was far easier to capitalize economically on Sam’s narrative by broadcasting stories about how his transgressive identity did, or more accurately did not, fit into the world of the NFL than to recognize that his attempt to make the final roster was a routine situation made extraordinary by the media’s continual focus on his nonnormative status.

And while there are many other factors that contributed to Sam’s inability to make an opening day roster, the only narrative that gains traction is that of personal failure, that Michael Sam “allowed himself to be distracted.” ²⁶ Sam fails to be the LGBT savior of sports and yet this requisite heroism seems, as Halberstam argues, too “committed to finding heroic models from the past” instead of focused on “the contradictory and complicit narratives that, in the past as in the present, connect sexuality to politics” (p. 148). Fagan’s critique of Sam seems to follow the argument that, for Americans, “believing that success depends upon one’s attitude is far preferable . . . than recognizing that their success is the outcome of the tilted scales of race, class, and gender” (p. 3). Fagan reprimands Sam for not doing more, but this estimation of accomplishment is dependent upon heteronormative formations of success that ignore the ways in which failure is constitutive to any version of living and necessary to normative versions of success. ²⁷

The narrative produced by Fagan, Page, and others is also representative of the ways in which valence contributes to any understanding of the term distraction. While distraction is situated as a negative quality with relation to Sam, this assumes that the term is deployed universally as a seemingly neutral evaluation when in reality it is strategically utilized to obscure particular ideologies (either for individuals or institutions). For example, Hall of Fame NFL coach, and current NBC Sports Analyst, Tony Dungy made clear his hesitation to take Sam in the draft had he been a coach because of the distraction that would have accompanied him. As Dungy stated, “I wouldn’t have taken him. Not because I don’t believe Michael Sam should have a chance to play, but I wouldn’t want to deal with all of [the distraction]” (Chase, 2014). Despite Dungy’s reticence to give Sam an opportunity to play based on the seemingly negative distraction that he would cause, he did not feel the same way about the distraction that accompanied Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players who, beginning in 2016, protested racial injustices in the United States by kneeling during the national anthem. Despite confirming that teams view Kaepernick as a distraction (Breech, 2017) Dungy stated that he would be supportive of players who came to him to ask for his permission to kneel (Goldberg, 2016). For Dungy, describing and identifying distraction is also about evaluating distraction. The distraction that adheres to Sam’s body is negatively valued because it draws attention to discussions of LGBT identities, ideas that are at odds with Dungy’s “Christian belief system” and ideologies of masculinity that permeate the sport (Brinson, 2014). Kaepernick is a positive distraction because he draws attention to racial disparities that are, in Dungy’s view, more valuable to relate to football than that of LGBT rights. Distraction is not an inherently negative quality but rather a bivalent signifier that is deployed strategically within the public sphere.

But if Fagan, Dungy, and others represent the ways in which the idea of distraction is utilized in regressive ways, or for the benefit of neoliberal institutions, how might a turn to work on queer failure be useful to think about the queered potential of these disappointments: “rather than just arguing for a reevaluation of these standards of passing and failing . . . [how might we] dismantle the logics of success and failure with which we currently live” (Halberstam, p. 2)? If media commentators and journalists had conceptualized Sam’s journey in queered terms, or at least if they attempted to disrupt traditional notions of what success could and should accomplish, then he would not exist within a binary of success or failure, but rather disappointment could stand in as a productive concept. Instead of needing Sam to represent a heroic figure, one whom the LGBT community could yoke their political gains to indiscriminately, we could instead see the contradictory narratives and lived realities of Sam’s experience as connecting sexuality to politics. Here, we could follow Halberstam’s call that we need to “strive to establish queerness as a mode of critique rather than as a new investment in normativity or life or respectability or wholeness or legitimacy” (pp. 110-111). By refocusing Sam’s journey as one of either complete success or abject failure, we ignore the ways in which the disappointment of his narrative should refocus our attention to the realities of navigating professional sports culture as an openly gay individual. This would also allow for a further critique of arguments that position the “coming out” narrative as an inherently successful political strategy on its own.

The Many Valences of In-Between

Sam’s body is also important to discussions of success and failure. Despite Fagan’s description of his hulking body, Sam’s size, or lack thereof, was often a topic of debate within NFL and media circles. In some evaluations released after his “coming out,” Sam was designated as a “tweener,” a distinction he received as he was considered too small to play defensive end but too slow to play linebacker: He was labeled as “in-between” the two positions (Goodbread, 2014). A closer examination of this term shows again how a seemingly neutral evaluation of Sam is deployed to mystify heteronormative structures. When discussing his career as an individual failing, Sam’s body is produced as a “hulking” mass that failed to live up to its expected potential, and yet, when debating the structural forces that contributed to his draft stock plummeting, his body is produced as a liminal state which exists outside the boundaries of acceptable sports classification.

But we cannot read his body within these texts without also identifying the ways in which his race, and its relationship to historical discussions of sexuality, is invoked or omitted from the conversation. Sam’s sexuality and his Blackness are assumed to be at odds with one another as “dominant discourse pertaining to Black and gay American men in sport is similar to perceptions of them in the broader culture, which holds that they are (and have long been) incompatible categories” (Anderson & McCormack, 2010, p. 950). Sam fails to live up to the masculine promise that Black bodies within sports are supposed to bring. His sexuality “threatens to disrupt taken-for-granted relations between gender and sexuality in sport” (Khan, 2017, p. 340) and, as a result, his tweener status is constructed as a failure for precisely the same reasons: It fails to deliver on the promise of Black masculinity. However, similar failings are not evaluated in the same sense for White athletes.

Tim Tebow, another collegiate SEC athlete, provides a useful comparison. While Tebow’s collegiate career received far more accolades and recognition than Sam’s, Tebow was considered a risky professional investment because his skill set translated better to positions other than quarterback (the position he played throughout college and was adamant about playing in the NFL). Despite deficient evaluations across metrics such as accuracy, ability to read route concepts, passing ability, and ball release, among others, Tebow was selected as a quarterback in the first round of the 2010 draft by the Denver Broncos. Tebow played sparingly in his first season, generally underwhelmed in his second, ²⁸ and was eventually traded to the New York Jets, with the understanding that he would play positions other than quarterback, prior to the start of the third season. ²⁹ He was released at the end of the season and, despite only throwing eight passes for the team, was given a preseason roster spot by the New England Patriots in 2013 before signing a 1-year contract with the Philadelphia Eagles in 2015 after taking a year off from football in 2014 to serve as a college broadcaster. ³⁰ At each stop, Tebow’s signing, playing time, and eventual release were considered front-page stories for sports news outlets, and often evaluated as a potential distraction, because of the media coverage and rabid fan base that followed Tebow to each team, a result of his outspoken and highly visible conservative Christian views (e.g., Breech, 2013; Howard, 2012). This same media attention followed Tebow in the summer of 2016 as he embarked on a new career as an aspiring professional baseball player.

Despite not having played competitive baseball for more than 11 years, the New York Mets signed Tebow to a minor-league contract in 2016 and, at the time, stated it was purely a baseball decision. After the season, the team later backtracked by saying they “signed him because he is a good guy, partly because of his celebrity, partly because this is an entertainment business” (Bonesteel, 2017). Despite the fact that Tebow represented the same issues of individualism, of athletic in-betweeness, and of distraction that were also associated with Sam, his signification of a particular type of benign Whiteness allowed him to occupy a more palatable role within sports culture. ³¹ For Tebow, failure became a brand to which he yoked his professional accomplishments. Failure was not representative of his lack of work ethic, like it was for Sam, but rather a result of it. Even Tebow recognized this when stating,

People will say, “What if you fail? What if you don’t make it?” Guess what? I don’t have to live with regret . . . And I would rather be someone who can live with peace and no regret than being so scared I didn’t make the effort. (McMillen, 2016)

Tebow’s failure becomes acceptable because of the possibilities made available by, and through, his Whiteness. For Tebow, failure becomes a profitable business model, tied to economic incentive through conspicuous displays of Whiteness. ³² Tebow relied on public performances of his Whiteness and his faith to offset the negativity associated with his sporting failure. Sam, as a Black gay man, was afforded none of these recuperative opportunities. If “queer bodies function within a psychoanalytic framework as the bearers of the failure of all desire” (Halberstam, p. 94), then for Sam, his racialized body, and its subsequent designation as a tweener, becomes the corporeal evidence of that failure.

Michael Sam and Failure as Doing Differently

Unpacking the various media/sport discourses that accompanied Michael Sam’s short-lived professional football career shows us how Sam was unable to produce himself as a success within heteronormative understandings of achievement as “queer failure is often deemed or understood as failure because it rejects normative ideas of value” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 173). Furthermore, this analysis highlights the way in which sports accomplishment is only a piece of the more general understanding of success within athletic competitions and culture. Just as important is an individual’s ability to produce themselves within a larger structure of heteronormative values (such as straightness, masculinity, Whiteness, marriage, and faith) as there are a great deal of obstacles inherent to straight temporalities and realities that ensure a certain kind of failure for the queer subject (Muñoz, 2009).

Sam’s draft day was by all normative sporting accounts, a “failure”—a disappointment for a player who should have been selected higher. Sam’s attempt at an NFL career was by all normative sporting accounts, a “failure”—a disappointment for a player who should have played at least a single snap in the regular season. And yet, for many, Sam represented a chance, as a community, to celebrate the ability of one of their own to step forward, to put his body, his desire, and his nonnormativity on display in a space usually not considered welcoming to transgressive behavior. While these contradictions might seem to only further confuse how we “read” Sam’s story, a return to queerness as a mode of thinking otherwise helps to locate the possibilities inherent to his narrative. As Chandan Reddy (2011) writes, “social antagonisms that emerge as a consequence of specific political forms of mediation have a historical and dialectical force in opening up materially specific alternative contingencies repressed by idealist conditions of possibility” (p. 36). So too do I argue, in this article, that the uncovering of these ruptures allows us to interrogate these spaces as productive sites that might tell us about potential ways to reposition success within antiracist and antiheteronormative frameworks.

But the story of Sam has additional ramifications for how queer culture in general might be reminded of the necessity to call attention to, rather than be constrained by, normative ideologies that often masquerade as seemingly neutral values and evaluations. As queer individuals are often predestined to fail within normative structures, rather than holding out hope for the mythic queer who might break this barrier, we instead can reconsider moments of failure as productive, as pointing us toward the ways in which failure, misfires, and disappointments are not only connected to queer history but have also served as an alternative way of being within normative structures. Just as Sam fits within a long line of queer failures within sports that point us toward a different understanding of the binary of success and failure, so too might the story of Sam be read as a moment that not only points us toward a future in which queer failure might be recognized for doing something else, but also as a buoy that provides for a collectivity that recognizes and bonds by way of failure, rather than one that must apologize for living their life otherwise. Rather than dismiss Sam’s story because of his failure, we might think about what his story can tell us about how cultural responses to notions of sexuality, race, and gender are questioned and rearticulated. All too often, sports are overimagined as a zero-sum game: For someone to win, someone else must lose. But what would happen if we were to look at sports and sports culture not as a zero-sum game, where one must fail if they do not succeed, but rather as a territory where possibilities can arise? In this estimation, queer culture could win, via Sam’s loss, as it creates a “field of utopian possibility as one in which multiple forms of belonging in difference adhere to a belonging in collectivity” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 20, my emphasis). It is not my goal to reiterate the ways in which sporting queers are situated to fail, but rather to attempt to think of the ways in which these seeming failures are productive of a different type of living. How might we see this failure, this unhappy ending, as a way to remind us of other ways of being? Sam, as a symbolic resource, as a site of cultural discourse, could be read not as an abject failure, but rather as a productive force that asks the sports world to engage with areas in which it falls short. His failure as an NFL player can then be thought of not as an individual disappointment but rather as a reminder that we have further to go, that we need to constantly reinsert discussions of equity and of otherwise into conversations of sports and sexuality, and that the conversation shouldn’t begin and end with an individual body but necessitates a larger look at the structural and institutional values inherent to sports culture that predispose some to fail and some to succeed.

Yes, it is true; the NFL will have to wait for an openly gay man to represent a different type of athlete. But we should perhaps return to a type of recognition of failures from the past, which reminds us that waiting is inherently a queer act as those from historically marginalized groups are often different and outside. Perhaps future LGBT athletes will have a different narrative than Sam’s, perhaps they will not, only time will tell. But as Muñoz writes, queer acts should not be pragmatic or goal oriented, but rather should be buoyed by their incompleteness and promise to another time and place. That they are waiting on the horizon is vitally important as the future is queerness’s domain.