A Coach’s Homophobic Taunt Forces Him to Reconsider the Weight of Words

IRVINE, Calif. — Russell Turner was on top of the world three years ago when he eased into a chair in front of a microphone. Sure, the men’s basketball team he was coaching, U.C. Irvine, had lost decisively to Oregon in the second round of the N.C.A.A. tournament. But the Anteaters had won a school-record 31 games that season, including their first tournament victory with an upset of Kansas State. There was also interest from Pac-12 and Mountain West Conference schools about hiring him.

And then Turner opened his mouth.

“Yeah, I’ll tell you,” Turner said with a laugh when he was asked about his conversation with the standout Oregon freshman Louis King in the postgame handshake line. “I was saying, double team ‘Queen,’ to try to see if I could irritate him. And I did.”

And on Turner went, describing with a satisfied smile how he thought a little gamesmanship had helped his team until King heated up in the second half.

“He had a thing or two to say to me during the game,” Turner said. “I wanted to let him know that what I had done was out of respect.”

Turner had barely touched down in Orange County the next day when his world turned upside down.

The homophobic and sexist taunts had embarrassed his school, angered colleagues and sparked a social-media tempest, with Martina Navratilova among those calling for his firing. Not only had Turner’s job prospects evaporated, but the one he had held with distinction at Irvine for nearly a decade was very much in jeopardy.

He was told not to come into the basketball offices in order to avoid the TV news trucks that were camped outside. He urged his players who wanted to publicly support him not to do so because they would be drawn into a mess they did not create.

He’d even infuriated his wife, Elizabeth, a critical care physician, who wondered how her magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa husband could be such a blockhead.

“When something like this goes viral, it feels out of control,” said Turner, whose next-day apology was criticized as inadequate. “It was intimidating.”

The furor eventually subsided, and Turner retained his job and regained the good graces of his wife. King, whom Turner called along with his parents to apologize, moved on to professional basketball the next season and has since played in the N.B.A. and its G League.

Turner eventually received an extension on a contract that had one year remaining and has continued to coach the Anteaters with aplomb: They have just concluded their 10th consecutive winning season and open the Big West Conference tournament on Thursday against U.C. Santa Barbara.

Quietly, though, Turner, 51, has resolved to be better.

He has met on his own with campus leaders and L.G.B.T.Q. advocates, and befriended Matt Lynch, an assistant coach at Chowan University, a Division II college in Murfreesboro, N.C., who is gay.

“My conversation with him early on was that in order for this to be an education, it has to be real work and to his credit, that’s exactly what he’s done,” said Jason Collins, who in 2014 became the first openly gay player to play in an N.B.A. game.

Collins was disappointed when he saw Turner’s taunts because he felt he knew him so well.

This was somebody Collins had known since his senior season at Stanford, when Turner arrived as an assistant coach. Their paths occasionally crossed in the N.B.A., and, when Collins came out in 2013, Turner was among those who conveyed his support.

Still, Turner, in that moment, represented what Collins said was a lingering problem: the casual homophobia, sexism and racism that is ingrained in male sports culture.

“Some of the people who used that language, the casual homophobia, that I heard when I was closeted were some of my biggest supporters after I came out,” Collins said. “There is that disconnect sometimes in the locker room.”

When Turner, who is 6-foot-7, rises from his seat on the U.C. Irvine bench to pace — bouncing on the balls of his feet, his hands fiddling in his pockets in a perpetual state of agitation — it is not hard to get a sense of what is important to him.

When the Anteaters score, he is expressionless. When they fail to rotate on defense, block out for a rebound or close out on a 3-point shooter, his face contorts and his baritone voice, which does little to betray his roots in rural Virginia, booms across the court. He then often signals down the bench for someone to sub in for the offending Anteater.

“He tells you what you need to hear even if you might not like it,” said Collin Welp, a fifth-year senior whose late father, Christian, was a first-round N.B.A. draft pick.

That facade of an assertive taskmaster dissolved on a recent afternoon when Turner sat in his office to discuss his taunts of King and his path forward. His chest heaved at the start of the conversation, and there were several times over the next couple of hours when he paused to gather himself or to wipe away a tear.

“I don’t know where the emotions come from,” he said at one point. “I guess just the disappointment that I could have hurt people through my success.”

The defiance he had immediately felt — he had considered himself an ally, and felt he was being made an example of by people who did not know him — dissipated quickly.

Turner began to understand why his actions had been so hurtful when he received an angry text from Collins’s mother, Portia, whom he had always respected. Collins connected him to Cyd Zeigler, a founder of the website Outsports, who was an early critic, and Turner tried to repair relationships on campus by listening to how he had hurt others — including some gay members of the university’s athletic department.

Several months later, he attended an Outsports symposium at U.C.L.A., where he listened to gay and transgender athletes share their experiences. He heard Greg Louganis, the gold medal-winning diver, recount the panic he experienced when he hit his head on the diving platform at the 1988 Olympics and began bleeding in the pool, knowing he had contracted H.I.V. He listened to Dave Kopay, a closeted N.F.L. player in the ’60s and ’70s, speak about the torment of falling in love with a teammate.

“The fear, stress, pressure that all these people had experienced is not something I would have ever been forced to consider that carefully,” Turner said. “What I came away with was even greater admiration for the courage that anyone facing such a difficult choice or set of circumstances has to have.”

That’s what prompted him to send a supportive text to Lynch two years ago, when he came out as gay shortly after he was fired along with the rest of the staff at North Carolina-Wilmington. (There are no publicly gay Division I men’s coaches.)

“For Matt to have made that announcement at the time, especially when his career was on the line, that was a big risk,” Turner said. “It took real courage.”

Lynch said he was driving back from watching college players in an open gym during the early months of the pandemic, wondering whether he still had a career in basketball, when he received a text from Turner. Lynch recalled the incident with King, which he called a mistake, but said he had been around the game enough to know that coaches are always looking for a perceived edge, be it signing a recruit, scheduling a game, calling a play — or trying to get under the skin of an opponent.

A few days later, Lynch and Turner spoke on the phone.

They talked about the events that brought them together — Lynch’s coming out and Turner’s taunt — but before long the conversation turned to basketball. They talked about defensive schemes, recruiting and player development. Turner, who spent a year as a women’s assistant at the University of San Francisco, encouraged Lynch to take a job as a women’s assistant at North Carolina-Wilmington, which he did in 2020-21.

“The truth is, he’s just made me feel like a basketball coach,” Lynch said of his conversations with Turner, who he said had introduced him to his staff. “At the end of the day, I just want to be a basketball coach; I don’t want to be the gay basketball coach.”

Turner also learned about Lynch’s gumption. Disappointed that college coaches were not responding to portfolios he mailed out in an effort to break into coaching, Lynch invested a few hundred dollars in an iPad, loaded his materials onto it and mailed it to Youngstown State. He figured at least the iPad — along with his résumé — wouldn’t end up in the trash. The ploy helped him land his first Division I men’s job, as a video coordinator at Youngstown State. He did the same thing at U.N.C. Wilmington.

That sort of boldness — the edge, as Turner described it — is an essential element for anyone navigating the ultracompetitive world of college basketball. It is present in myriad ways, including how coaches talk to players: the language they use in outlining rosy possibilities during recruiting, in coldhearted discussions about playing time, or in intense, sometimes graphic, instruction in practices or huddles.

Turner says that while he is demanding, he is in tune with his players — he notes that few leave his program; the recent four-year retention rate was 98 percent.

He is also more careful with his words, though he believes it’s important to get the attention of players — sometimes using explicit terms.

Though a college coach is an educator, the basketball court is not exactly a classroom. It can be visceral and heated, and emotions are often heightened by the roar of the crowd. Thus, for communication to be effective, it must be memorable — otherwise a message may not resonate in a crucial moment.

Turner said he now realizes it is inappropriate to use sexist expletives to chide players who complain about officiating. He has told his Black players that they should not use racist slurs with each other, even if they deem it socially acceptable.

Yet Turner has also borrowed something he heard in the N.B.A., when a coach wanted to emphasize how closely an opponent should be guarded: Put your genitals on him, the instruction went, using a more graphic term. If the defender still wasn’t close enough, the coach would remind the player that his equipment wasn’t that big.

“I think that’s OK for 18- to 22-year-old guys because they’ll remember that,” said Turner, while acknowledging that others might disagree.

The standards for appropriate behavior, though, are clearly shifting.

Michigan Coach Juwan Howard was suspended for five games, amid speculation that he might be fired, for striking a Wisconsin assistant coach after a game last month. A Duke assistant coach, Chris Carrawell, was roundly criticized for snubbing North Carolina Coach Hubert Davis in the handshake line after Duke’s loss on Saturday night.

Those incidents and others might have been shrugged off not so many years ago.

“We can’t be the aggressive people in pursuit of an edge and excellence without walking near boundaries from time to time,” Turner said, adding that Howard — like himself — was likely the victim of his own hubris. “But we all know the responsibilities we have not to cross them.”

He added: “I’m willing to take on some risk, but I don’t want to take on the risk of doing something like this again, so I’ve tried to be more aware of everything I say and try to catch myself. I’ve got to keep pressure on myself to be better.”