Todd Frazier, then with the Reds, was on his way to winning Major League Baseball’s home run derby in Cincinnati four years ago when Scott MacArthur made the seminal decision to come out as gay to his parents. It was an otherwise typical Monday night at the MacArthur home in Oakville: dinner, a couple of drinks. The mid-season derby was airing on mute in the family room when MacArthur, then the Blue Jays reporter at TSN Radio, ripped off the Band-Aid. “I remember thinking, ‘The moment you tell them, there’s no going back. There’s no more pretending’ … It doesn’t mean everybody else knows yet, but you now can’t have this facade because you’ve told the two most important people in your life,” recalled MacArthur, now host of Blue Jays Talk on Sportsnet 590 The FAN and filling in on other shows through the summer.The words didn’t come easily, he said. He started to cry before he got them out: “I remember clearly saying, ‘I’m gay and I always have been.’” It was only the second time that MacArthur, then 36, had spoken those words to another person, outside of clandestine hook-ups. The first one he told was a psychotherapist, who he began working with in early 2015 when he felt burned out at work and knew he was in trouble.Telling dad Jamie and mom Terry wasn’t nerve-wracking, he said. It was necessary.“At that point it was either I do this or I die — quite literally. There’s no point in living like this any longer. I’d gotten to that point.”That was only the beginning of a lengthy journey to share his truth, which he went public with on July 20 in a video posted on YouTube.“I am sitting before you today as a gay man who is a proud gay man,” MacArthur said.Such a proclamation is rare in the world of professional sports. In MLB, former Los Angeles Dodgers Billy Bean and Glenn Burke (who died in 1995 from AIDS complication ...
|
