2022 Rewind: Colton Underwood Avoided Team Showers, was 'Afraid of Getting Turned On'

EDGE is looking back at 2022 and we're resharing some of our favorite stories of the year. 

Former NFL player Colton Underwood says he avoided showering with teammates because he feared getting "turned on". Instead, he would skip the post-practice wash, TMZ reported.

Underwood added that it was a "silly" thing to do, since "I never really was attracted to anybody who I played with, or coaches." Still, it was a fear of being outed that drove him to such extremes.

Avoiding dressing and showering with his teammates was part of a larger pattern, Underwood related, saying, "There was just a lot of things that I sort of did differently than other players because I felt like I had to, because I didn't want questions to start being asked."

Underwood made the comments during a Dec. 15 appearance on the Call Her Daddy," reports said.

That fear also drove other behaviors. Away from the locker room and his fellow football players, Underwood said, he tried to have sex with men he thought would also be "straight in their real life," Page Six detailed.

"I don't think there was any man that was going to be coming out to get me because they would be outing themselves as well," Underwood explained, going on to say, "It wasn't like a ton of men. It was like a few, and they never had my real name".

The comments are of a piece with remarks he's made on "Coming Out Colton," Page Six noted. "I was suppressing my sexuality so hard that I was taking medication daily to deal with depression and anxiety, and that made me a paranoid freak," the publication quoted Underwood as saying in the Netflix documentary series.

"I didn't trust a whole lot of people, and I was trying to do anything and everything I could to protect a secret."

Since coming out, Underwood has been able to live his life more authentically in all its aspects, including openly dating a man, Jordan C. Brown, Page Six detailed.

Addressing his relationship on the podcast, Underwood said, "It's been healthier for sure, there's been no hitches," unlike the relationships he had while still in the closet.

"With women, I would always look for a way out or try to find an escape plan," Underwood recalled. It's different with Brown: "We're having a good time. There's no pressure."