NBA Legend Tim Hardaway Apologizes for 2007 Homophobic Comments
Former NBA professional basketball player Tim Hardaway expressed remorse for comments he made in 2007 where he declared he was “homophobic” and hated gay people.Hardaway, who played for the Golden State Warriors and Miami Heat among other teams during a 15-year career, told Ron Kroichick of the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this week that the comments were the result of his religious upbringing which instilled an anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice from an early age.“I grew up in a church, and that’s the way churches were — they instilled in you that [homosexuality] wasn’t the way you should be,” Hardaway told Kroichick and the Chronicle. “I was just taught differently.
Don’t talk to them, don’t mess with them, leave them alone. I never tried to talk bad about them or do hateful stuff. It was just my upbringing in church.
But I’ll tell you this: It was so wrong of me, and people have suffered. I had to grow up and really do some soul-searching.
What I said was just hurtful.” Hardaway made the original homophobic comments during a 2007 interview on The Dan Le Batard Show in response to a question about how he would handle having a gay player as a teammate.“First of all, I wouldn’t want him on my team,” Hardaway said at the time. “Second of all, if he was on my team, I would really distance myself from him because I don’t think that’s right…and I don’t think that he should be in the locker room while we in the locker room.
