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HIV-positive announcement

puts sports on hold for today

I was prepared to write today about new Colorado football coach and former UCLA assistant Rick Neuheisel. I could have commented on the various aspects of this program's loss being another program's gain.

I might have even scrapped the football story to tell a tale about the most entertaining pickup basketball game ever played.

Both of these stories were in the works. But both stories lost their significance when I read today's Viewpoint article by Sheldon Allen.

Allen disclosed today that he is HIV-positive ­ the first such disclosure he has made to all but his closest friends. Not even his family knows his HIV-status.

It will not be received in pages like these as Magic Johnson's bombshell announcement. It will likely remain, in fact, out of every sports page ­ save this one ­ in the country.

But Allen's disclosure helped me put into perspective, if just for a minute, day, or week, how meaningful the other stories of the day truly were. Neuheisel is a good man with whom I've talked on a couple of occasions. Friendly person, positive and worthy career move. The pickup basketball game ­ well, it was lighthearted and comical.

But Sheldon Allen's story is what mattered most to me ­ more than the games, the numbers, the playoffs, the upcoming hoop season, the team's unknown fifth starter. Sheldon Allen is a friend of mine.

He took my twin sister to a high school winter formal. I went to high school with the guy. Came here a year after him. See him almost every day out and about on campus or at work. Talk to him often, shake his hand always. Probably the firmest handshake you will ever receive.

He is, as I tell friends that inquire, someone I see all the time. And a good guy.

This comes as a surprise to no one from home, of course. He was a school joker. He entertained the school in a "Mr. Nice Guy" competition that features a group of seniors whom the school deems, as the title quite simply implies, nice.

But today he clutched up like few athletes ever have. He came through with more courage than a football player shrugging off injury to win the game. He was braver than any player was in any game today, tomorrow or the next day.

And in what was perhaps poetic justice, I got the news on my way to Biology 40, Roger Bohman's class about AIDS. Today's topic? Disclosure of HIV-status.

"There are few matters of a more personal nature, and there are few occasions over which a person could have a greater desire to control, than the manner in which he/she reveals (an HIV+ status.)"

The words were appropriately chosen for the day. Ironic? Perhaps. Poetic justice? Certainly.

Bohman continued to detail the political nuances of HIV-status disclosure, filled with hypothetical instances that brought into question the worthiness of an absolute policy regarding disclosure.

How about, he asked, the franchise player on the UCLA football team. He comes out of college, and with all the salary demands of these young players, oh, asks for $100 million. After long months of negotiating, the team relents, agreeing to give the player a long term contract and the money he wants.

There's just one condition: because of the length of the contract, you, franchise athlete, need to disclose your HIV-status on an annual basis. A positive test voids the contract.

Bohman says the hypothetical generally evokes this kind of response from athletes: "For $100 million, you could test me every day." Disclosure is easy if the test is negative ...

And it's because of that that Allen takes the day's claim as a most admirable person. No, he is not an athlete, and he has no contract to fall back upon.

And perhaps these words do not belong on the sports page. Perhaps they have no true relevance to any teams, any coaches, or really any sport. They are merely a diversion from a world in which rules and balls and passes and catches dominate. Where it is easy to lose sight of who is playing ­ and not just that something is being played.

Sports is not unlike life. And Allen's story is about just that. Sheldon Allen is not an athlete, he is just a student with a positive test and an even more positive attitude. Play on.

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