Troy Vincent, a former NFL player and
current league executive, has said that the NFL is ready for its
first openly gay player.
The 43-year-old Vincent is the senior
vice president of the NFL Player Engagement Organization. He and
Dwight Hollier, also a former player who works as the NFL's
director of transition and clinical services, addressed more than a
dozen people at New York City's Hetrick-Martin Institute, a
non-profit devoted to LGBT youth, at an event organized by the You
Can Play Project, which works to end homophobia in sport.
Vincent
told the crowd that he believes the NFL is ready for its first
openly gay player: “As far as we're concerned, it's 'Come on out!'”
He added that he had gay teammates when
he played professional football. “We aren't worried about the
locker room. We're worried about how to keep a guy safe when he
leaves the locker room.”
“People always ask me what's keeping
the first NFL player from coming out,” Vincent said. “And they
seem to think that there is something the league is doing wrong
that's preventing it, or that there's something specific about the
culture. I've never believed that. The same obstacles that keep
people all across the world from coming out are what keep an NFL
player from coming out.”