Some dudes are just punks, like Kwame Brown. I love the guy, but let’s face it.

But what’s a punk, really? Maybe Kordell Stewart can tell you.
May-be. Dave Kopay definitely can tell you.

It’s a blast listening to Dave Kopay because he speaks with the freedom of an outsider. Here was a guy who was at the dawn of football’s nascent popularity. He played under Lombardi, with the Washington Redskins. He’s a great window into innocent times. Super straight, in a gay kind of way.       

He was also a big-time Bay Area athlete. Played across town from Glenn Burke in times when there were rollicking times to be had.

Kopay, 64, is back in Seattle, where he he had completed his degree in history, back in 1966. (In his back-in-the-day downtime, he earned All-America honors at running back in leading the Huskies to the 1964 Rose Bowl appearance.) Now retired. A lifetime playing sports, hard, has had Kopay undergoing mulitiple joint-replacement procedures. And the northwest is a good spot for recovery — even compared to the cool Larchmont house the athlete-turned carpet salesman had in L.A.

And Kopay’s health is on the rise. The Sherman Oaks Notre Dame grad knows there are exNFLers out there way worse off than him.

Tell me about Seattle?

I move up here [in 1961], they looked at me and said, “Oh, we’ve got a pretty good jewel here.” I started in my sophomore year, on a team that had just been to the Rose Bowl. Then I got benched and ended up not even ending up getting a letter my junior year and was the sixth or seventh defensive tackle. It was horrible, but I really wasn’t very tough. I kinda pouted and was a big baby.

But everything did turn around when I did get my starting job back and started both ways, averaging 29 minutes a game, both ways. When went to the Rose Bowl I was co-captain of that team and made all coast. It was a pretty amazing year. When I focused on football, I was able to play pretty well.

It’s appropriate that we’re talking on Martin Luther King day. I was a
product of the sixties at the University of Washington and certainly
saw the inequalities that existed on sports teams, with black players. Certainly Warren Moon wouldn’t have had a chance to play quarterback on the team that I played on.

All the stuff that was happening with the civil rights movement and our humanity and the personal struggles that we all have. Then I went down to D.C. in 1969 and Martin Luther King asked that his country “judge me by the content of my character, not by the color of my skin.” Well, I was reflecting at that point about why I was having such a difficult time coming out.

I always seemed to gravitate toward the black players on even my college team because I had a struggle. People would look at
me, a blonde, blue-eyed white boy and they thought I had everything. Well, that wasn’t the case. I was an emotional cripple in those days.

[Last year] I left LA because I was retiring. I’d wanted to retire for a
long time. I was able to make a good living and I did like a lot of my
[Valley flooring] customers,  but there were times where I wasn’t in to being where I was, which was selling floor coverings. I would have loved to coach, but I never had an opportunity to do that, especially after I spoke out. And I knew that would probably happen.

Having said all you’ve said over the years, do you still feel like a  member of the NFL fraternity?

I feel I’m a peer. There were a couple of coaches who welcomed me as a peer, certainly not as a fraternity member. Marty Schottenheimer, when  I went to visit my old teammate Howard Mudd when he was coaching in Cleveland,  welcomed me there. I didn’t know him, but he certainly knew  I was a teammate of howard’s and certainly had heard of my book. A  number of players —Earnest Byner for one example, and that big tackle who was a minister, Cody Riesen — we got in the elevator and right away  Cody said, “I read your book and thought it was terrific.” It was  amazing. He was a minister! He said pretty nice things. It was amazing.

When I’ve been at NFL activities, I’ve never been affected negatively.
But I have a very good friend, Alex Karras, who doesn’t even care  to watch football and he was one of the best players, maybe, to play the game. I was just on the phone with him and he wasn’t very excited about the playoffs or anything.

Why do you think that is?

The pain and the inequities from when we played, in terms of money.

How did you avoid becoming bitter?

I used [football] as a way to achieve my identity. It wasn’t my
identity as a person, because I left and certainly didn’t want anything to do with football, just like I left my sales job — and I certainly didn’t identify as just a salesman; my job never defined me.

What about another big name? What about Kordell Stewart? He was gonna be big. Like Kobe big. Did the pressure make it hard for him?

Are you kidding me? Of course it was harder!

Did you know Glenn Burke?

Oh, Glenn was a very sweet guy. Talk about a guy who was destroyed by a real asshole…

Are you talking about Tommy Lasorda?

Yeah. To this day, Lasorda’s at the top of my shit list. I knew his son, too.
I didn’t know him well, but I met him a couple of times at a bar we
both went to in Hollywood.

Glenn just fell in with the wrong people. And, because of his
background, he didn’t have anything to fall back on when they took
baseball away from him. And, basically, they took baseball away from him.

I don’t know the Billy Martin story.

When Burke was in Oakland he ridiculed him something terrible, in front of people and everything. It destroyed him. Glenn had enough vibrancy  and personal fortitude to come up with the high five. He was a really gifted athlete and smarter than people think. He didn’t have formal schooling, but he was not a dumb guy.

I understand that Burke was an incredible athlete, but his numbers don’t reflect that.

Well, he could never be loose at the plate. In football, the more wound up you are, the better it is. In baseball you have to be relaxed to hit  the ball. He still hit the ball pretty well, but he wasn’t consistent. Certainly, the pressure and scrutiny that he was under had a lot to do with that.

I didn’t know him very well, but I knew some of the people he was hanging out with and some of the older men who used him and took advantage of him.

Was there a fraternity of gay athletes back then?

It was a small world, in terms of getting around. He came up to me at a book signing in the Castro District. I didn’t hang out with him. I  wasn’t sure enough of myself in a lot of ways, even then. And I was  always too worried about being in the fast lane. I knew that I kinda  liked that. But I knew that I didn’t want that. So I didn’t do too much serious partying. Thank God. That’s why I’m alive.

What did you think of John Amaechi doing a book?
It’s funny with John, because that coach said he hated white people. Then John said my mother was a white doctor, the person who means the most to me in my entire life. He didn’t like John because of his King’s English.

When your book came out I can’t imagine you got such a push.

I had no publicity…

Thursday: Gay preps, gay coaches, straight coaches etc.

Donnell Alexander is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Sports & Fitness.