MOLI VIEW™

Somewhere, there exists very funny footage from an unfinished film called Touch Down: Origins of the Ass-Slap in Sports that I made with director Rashidi Harper, writer-producer David Davis, and actor Darius Dudley. The protagonist in this mocumentary is straight, but we thought it would be a funny touch to cast Dave Kopay as a witness to the NFL's very first booty smack. The punchline is that Joe Namath's flamboyance, the '60s revolution, etc., all flowed out of this unremarked-upon spontaneous gesture.

Since the shoot I managed to lose track of Kopay, who had become the modern era's first openly gay sports star, chronicled in his 1977(!) book Kopay. Dude's an important figure, so I wrote him a letter at last year's end and learned that Dave's moved to Seattle, where he was once an All-American running back at the University of Washington. (He recently willed $1 million to UW's Q Center.) In the days leading up to the Super Bowl, I'll be publishing parts of a wide-ranging interview with Kopay. He remains a legend not for playing in 111 NFL games, but for coming out so early and speaking eloquently about issues surrounding sexuality and sport.

We talked on Martin Luther King Day, a day after the Super Bowl match-ups were set. Early on, we discussed his life-changing love affair with the Washington Redskins' tight end Jerry Smith, who was effectively written out of history after dying of AIDS in 1986. "When Shannon Sharpe broke his record for receptions," Kopay informed me, "you had to try to figure out whose record Sharpe had actually broken."

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