151 the day lz granderson and i meet up for his interview in los angeles is pictureperfect a bright blue sky and a warm midday sun granderson is the picture of contentment happily juggling multiple responsibilities on a daily basis including coanchoring sportsnation at espn a sister network of abc news and being a political analyst and cohost of strait talk he is beaming as he scrolls through his phone sharing pictures of his new dog a rescue named casper as we step off the elevator together he reminds me hes on a bit of a tight schedule on call to pick up casper from his groomer but as youll see from his interview episode an hour of conversation with granderson just flies right by granderson and i are colleagues at abc news weve coanchored many long hours and late nights of political coverage over the 2016 election cycle ushering our audience through some big moments in american history together offcamera he and i have talked a lot about our families and our personal lives and each time we talk i learn something new about him something that usually isnt apparent when you look at his life and his success and his happiness today this meeting was no different i learned about his childhood in detroit his estrangement from his stepfather his faith and how it came into conflict with his sexuality the years spent in the closet hiding who he was from his family his friends and his wife even now ive been out for probably longer than i was in the closet said granderson but i still go through moments in which i go back and reprocess life when i was in the closet there were years of teenage insecurity through high school and college there were classmate and celebrity crushes on sports fields in classrooms and in church pews granderson moved through life in the way that was expected of him in the way that he was seen as a straight black man but all the time he says he was fighting who he really was i think drowning is a good sort of way to imagine what its like he told me and you can see the air you know and you can paddle as fast as you can you know but you have this albatross around you thats holding you down and you just feel like you cant fully breathe and you cant be yourself and that was certainly the case for me granderson shared his experience of coming out during our conversation including one of the strongest reasons he had for doing so his son he talked about the struggle to reconcile his faith with his sexuality and about the difficulties he faced professionally as he began a career in sports journalism i was a young buck in the 90s you see trying to break into the business granderson said and at that point it was pretty comfortable to say things like