Alone in the Trenches
My Life as a Gay Man in the NFL
-
- ¥2,200
-
- ¥2,200
発行者による作品情報
This is Esera Tuaolo's own searing story of terror and hope. A Samoan raised on a Hawaiian banana plantation, he had a natural talent, football. He went on to play for five NFL teams: the Green Bay Packers, the Minnesota Vikings, the Jacksonville Jaguars, the Carolina Panthers, and the Atlanta Falcons in the 1999 Super Bowl. But for the nine years he played professional football he lived in terror that when his face flashed upon the TV screen, someone would divulge his darkest secret. Esera Tuaolo is gay.
Alone in the Trenches takes you inside the homophobic world of professional football and describes fears that almost drove him to suicide. He evokes heartbreak--how his older brother, Tua, died of AIDS--and hope when, Esera, a deeply devout Christian fell in love and started a family.
“Tuaolo emerges in these pages as a complex, intellectually curious and fascinating individual defined neither by his choice of career nor by his sexual orientation.” --Booklist
“Tough, tender and brutally honest.” --Robert Lipsyte, former New York Times sports columnist
“Even I was not prepared for his amazing life story.” --Billy Bean, author of Going the Other Way
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After impoverished Samoan immigrant Tuaolo attended Oregon State on a football scholarship, he was drafted by the Green Bay Packers and then spent nine years in the NFL on five different teams. Yet he was "terrified" during the 1999 Super Bowl, when he was playing for the Atlanta Falcons: "not one teammate, coach or sportswriter knew I was gay.... What if one of those billion people watching recognized me as the stranger he had picked up in a gay bar?" Tuaolo's intimate description of such fears kicks off this absorbing, first-person account, co-written with journalist Rosengren. The author looks back with straight-talking honesty, recalling his Oahu childhood on a banana farm, his teen years in the continental U.S. and his introduction to the testosterone-crazed culture of the locker room. Pages filled with the kind of football lore that only an NFL insider could know are punctuated with Tuaolo's painful dread of discovery. The first player to sing the national anthem and then start an NFL game, Tuaolo now has a new career in musical theater and recordings. His book communicates a warmth and openness that will appeal to both football fans and the gay community.
