Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Kicker Eric Lueshen was openly gay NE Cornhusker football player 11 years ago; took boyfriend to NU Student-Athlete formal, says Coach Callahan couldn't have been nicer to him

Lueshen then and now: left as a NU Cornhusker kicker
and right from Facebook page
Former University of Nebraska Cornhusker football player Eric Lueshen (a husker kicker from 2003 to 2006) told Firth (a village near Nebraska's capital, Lincoln) radio station KNTK "The Ticket" that he did not hide the fact that he was gay while at UNL and even took his boyfriend to a student-athlete formal when he was a freshman. Lueshen said that while Callahan was very accepting (and even shed a tear when Lueshen shared his story), not all the assistants were. The radio interview is in two segments, Part 1 and Part 2.
“Two of my really good friends on the team, Sean Hill and Corey McKeon, asked me at lunch one day, ‘We were just wondering if you were gay.’ I very honestly said, ‘Yes, is that a problem?’ They were like, ‘Oh no, that’s really cool. We all thought that you were, and we just wanted to know.’”
From Big Red Today:
     The Pierce, Neb., native said coaches were also aware that he was gay, and that the Nebraska walk-on and World-Herald All-Class selection in C-1 once took a boyfriend to the student-athlete formal.
     And while he said that some assistants made him feel uncomfortable, “numerous coaches were very, very kind, and very sweet to me.” Coach Bill Callahan was “accepting of me,” Lueshen said. “I know in the conversations I’ve had with him how much he respected me as a person.”
     At the time, Nebraska's head football coach was Bill Callahan, now a Dallas Cowboys offensive coordinator and offensive line coach.
Too see CNN's coverage of Ron Brown's trip from Lincoln to Omaha to
deliver a sanctimonious sermonette to the City Council go here. To see
Brown's condescending remarks in their entirety, go here.
     AKSARBENT would love to know whether Assistant Coach Ron Brown was among those who supported Lueshen the way his teammates and Head Coach Callahan did or whether Brown was among the coaches who shunned Lueshen and said "negative things."
     So far, Lueshen is being tactfully unspecific on that score. Pity. A lot of people would like to know if Ron Brown is really as 'tolerant' of gay players as he has claimed to be while on various Jihads against laws which would give LGBTs legal recourse against arbitrary discrimination.
     A gay player who has actually seen how Brown behaves in the locker room away from TV cameras could provide a much-needed reality check about whether the assistant coach's private behavior toward gay players matches his public claims about being respectful of them.

 

No comments:

Post a Comment

ShareThis