"A lot of owners are homophobes"

"'Have you got AIDS?' That was the first question EPSN asked me after I'd said that I'm homosexual. Hell, that wasn't an easy start." John Amaechi made his sexual orientation public five years ago and became the first - and up to now the only - NBA player to do so. The toughest response came from Tim Hardaway, who retired in 2003: "I would never have accepted a homosexual in the locker room." Steve Hunter, then at Denver, said that he had no problem with a gay player "as long as he doesn't make advances on me, comes to play like a man and conducts himself like a good person."

Amaechi doesn't know which was worse. "What I am clear on is that if in a locker room heterosexuals fear the presence of homosexuals, we're dealing with a gay locker room," says the former player, who retired with the Knicks in 2004.

Amaechi was in Spain at the invitation of the Bilbao-based Fundación Athletic to participate in a conference on equality in sport. He says Andrei Kirilenko, a teammate at Utah Jazz, treated him best: "The same as others, like Shaquille O'Neal or Charles Barkley, but it's true he was more expressive [Kirilenko invited him to his birthday party: "Bring your partner, or whoever you want."] because maybe in Europe the theme is viewed better than in the NBA. And Russia is not exactly a model in these cases..."

Amaechi realized he was gay when he was 16 and living in England. "If I'd made my sexual orientation public then, I'd be a fat psychologist in Manchester and I'd be happy," he chuckles. Today he is an ex-NBA pro, more than two meters tall and weighing 120 kilos, who feels at home in Europe. "Here, in Manchester, or Bilbao, I find the calm that doesn't exist in my life in the USA. I'm European, that's very clear."

Although the perception of homophobia in sports is changing, Amaechi says it is not so much the players, "who are more worried about fashion, or their hair..." but the sports financiers who are behind the times. "They are the ones that instill these homophobic concepts. The owner of the Jazz, when I was playing there, was also a cinema owner, and he banned Brokeback Mountain . There are still 30 states in the USA where you can be sacked for being gay."

Amaechi, a qualified psychologist, today works with children in Manchester to internalize equality. The fears of Hardaway are in the past, as is the perception that "gays are always thinking about sex."

"If you're thinking about sex when you're playing, you'll lose for sure," he says with irony. What he remembers most is the definition of homophobia he received from someone he declines to name: "Heterosexuals fear that homosexuals are thinking about them in the same way that they think about women."

Equality, in any case, is uneven: "Lesbianism is viewed more kindly by heterosexuals. It's a focus of interest, of curiosity. Homosexuality, no. But discrimination is the same. This year in the UK the first woman joined the executive board of the Football Association, in the 21st century!"