Before Jordan Kent, there was Peg Rees.
Rees was Oregon’s last three-sport athlete. But she played in the pre-Title IX days, when media coverage for women’s sports was almost non-existent. As a result, she received a mere fraction of the attention that was bestowed upon Kent when he went out for the football team last year and has subsequently been hailed as Oregon’s first three-sport athlete in 30 years.
Funny how all those media reports never actually provided the name of Kent’s predecessor. In fact, Rees’ accomplishment has sunken so far into obscurity that when former Oregon soccer player Nicole Garbin was contemplating playing basketball and lacrosse for the Ducks earlier this year, I had to call the Athletic Department to ask them to dig through their record books and find out whether Oregon had ever had a three-sport female athlete.
Rees actually played in the same period that Jordan Kent’s father, Ernie, suited up for the Ducks. Rees says she and Ernie Kent were good friends, and between 1974 and 1977, Rees played basketball, volleyball and softball for Oregon. In 1984, she returned to Oregon as an assistant volleyball coach, and remained with the team until 1993.
Today, at age 52, Rees is the director of the physical education program on campus, and also doubles as the voice of Oregon softball, calling softball games from the press box at Howe Field for Duck home games.
Basically, she’s a walking, talking repository of Oregon women’s sports history.
But to me, what makes her life story even more remarkable are the personal struggles that she had to deal with throughout her time as an athlete and a coach.
See, Rees is a lesbian-identified woman.
She popped onto my radar late last term, when she e-mailed me right after the Emerald’s two-part series on homosexuality in college sports, and said that as a lesbian and coach who’d spent her entire athletic career in the closet, she was glad that someone was finally bringing to light an issue that had been stuffed into the shadows for decades.
From Rees, I finally got the final piece to the puzzle that I’d spent three weeks trying to put together: a retrospective view of what it was like to be a closeted gay athlete – from a person who’d lived that life during an era where strong women were considered strange and the word “lesbian” carried such negative connotations that it wasn’t even used by that many lesbians themselves.
“When I was an athlete, I don’t even think I knew the word lesbian,” Rees said. “I knew that I was different from the majority of people around me, but in the seventies, ‘lesbian’ was a word that was such a pejorative that even if I realize I was gay – which is a softer term – I would never have called myself a lesbian.”
Rees said that even though the Athletic Department had an official gay-friendly stance, the 1970s were so rife with homophobia that she never felt as if coming out would work to her advantage in any way.
Now that she looks back, she says she can identify several members of her basketball team who were probably gay, but none of them ever even contemplated the idea of coming out because there was too much risk involved.
As an assistant volleyball coach in the 1980s, Rees says she stayed in the closet because, despite the Athletic Department’s gay-friendly position, she knew the head coach of the volleyball team was homophobic and she didn’t want to risk losing her job if her sexuality ever became an issue.
“I wanted my career to be in my hands,” Rees said. “I didn’t want to be the reason we didn’t get a great athlete. If there was some concern in the family of a recruit about one of the Oregon coaches being gay, they might not send their kid here.
“It would be a fear borne out of ignorance, but it’s real. And I didn’t want to be the reason that the program didn’t get a good athlete.”
Rees also says she always felt that she would be able to do more good for students by remaining in the closet, staying in the system, and supporting them than by ‘coming out,’ and being a flash in the pan for a week.”
But this came at the expense of herself.
“I paid for it personally: The quality of my own life was lessened because I had to remain closeted,” said Rees, in her steady, matter-of-fact manner.
Still, she could only keep hiding her identity for so long.
In 1993, Rees went back to the classroom to get a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies. A lesbian guest panel in her WGS 101 class changed her outlook on her life completely, and that’s when she realized that she could no longer continue to live a lie.
“One of the women on the lesbian panel was a UO employee, and she talked about being out and working at the counseling center, and she was the first counselor in America for the gay and lesbian student community,” Rees said. “And suddenly it dawned on me: I can work here at the University and be out? And when I realized that was the case, I decided to quit coaching.
“I was in a place in my life where I’d had the career I wanted, and I felt it was time to be true to myself and live more honestly and to be out. And I chose not to do that in the Athletic Department because there could still be negative ramifications.”
Regardless of how many leaps and bounds we’ve made as a society in terms of gay rights, it struck me then that we still have an incredibly long way to go.
Peg Rees subsumed her own life for decades in order to pursue her passion for sports. When she finally decided to come out, she simultaneously decided that the decision would work best away from the realm of athletics – a field that she’d considered her home for years.
And when you think about it, are things really all that different in today’s world? Players still run the risk of losing scholarships or being bumped out through the back door. Coaches still stand to lose their jobs or lose ground in the recruiting rat race if they come out. The recent Pokey Chatman scandal at Louisiana State has proved that being an out homosexual member of the sports community still carries immeasurable risks. As evidenced by former Penn State coach Rene Portland’s resignation from the women’s basketball team after allegations that she discriminated against her players based on their sexuality, being gay in sports is still not okay.
What will it take to finally bring the facade down?
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