Man in the middle

One night, John Amaechi went to bed a retired basketball player, about to release his autobiography. The next morning, he woke up emblazoned across the front pages of USA Today and the New York Times. The news that his book would reveal he was gay had been leaked by bloggers.

"It was a very strange experience," he says. "I consider myself a pretty rounded guy. I've done pretty elite things in business, sport and academics and all of a sudden I woke up one morning and I'm a 'big, black, British, gay guy'. That was frustrating at times."

His admission rocked sport and prompted spiteful remarks from top players and death threats from the public, although the response on the whole he says has been "95% positive".

Now the "craziness" has died down and he can concentrate on making the news for other reasons. The Amaechi Basketball Centres Foundation is about to open its second youth center in the UK, a $16m development in Bradford. The first center, in his home city of Manchester, opened seven years ago and has 5,000 young people aged five to 25 attending every week. Amaechi believes his centers are more about community-building than sport.

We build community centers where you come play different sports, you can go to a library, you can use a computer, see a counselor — talk about anything from what you plan on doing in the future for a job to some problems you are having at home. It's this holistic center, this hub for the community in Manchester. It's a pretty massive project; we plan on building four more centers in England before 2012. — John Amaechi

"A tiny part of it is basketball-related. While I definitely want to see the next amazing basketball player to come out of Britain and go off to the US and play in the Olympics, and the centers are a way to make that happen, it's only 2% of the whole."

"The most part of my interest is that young people get to interact with peers. Not without conflict and not without stress, because they are part of life, but within a set of rules and organized in such a way they can learn to interact with each other under these conditions."

The foundation's slogan is "legacy starts now" and Amaechi is clearly a man who thinks about how he will be remembered.

"I think when you show young people that you care and when you build infrastructure and community and when you allow people to experience things and grow in ways they hadn't thought possible, that's how your legacy is built."

"My sexual orientation and the fact I played basketball will be increasingly unimportant in the face of that."

At 400ft they see a big black man and they cross the road to avoid me. At 200ft they cross back because they realize that I'm a professional basketball player and they want a closer look. At 50ft they recognize me as the gay bloke who just came out and then they cross back across the road again. One thing I've discovered is that bigots are usually less than brave. I am 6'9", 320 lbs and black — most people don't want to be a bigot to my face. — John Amaechi