Views on Gay Rights of Ravens" Ayanbadejo Are Rooted in Upbringing In recent weeks, Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo has been praised in many quarters for supporting the legalization of same-sex marriage. His stance is not new, but it reached a wider audience after a Maryland delegate urged the Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti to silence him. Supporters of gay marriage rallied around Ayanbadejo, the Ravens and others in pro football backed him, and Ellen DeGeneres exchanged glowing messages with him on Twitter. For Ayanbadejo, 36, it was a comforting shift from 2009, when he became one of the first athletes from a major American professional sports team to publicly speak out in support of same-sex marriage. That year, he found gay slurs directed at him on Internet message boards. In the Ravens" locker room, players made crude remarks and asked him when he would reveal his homosexuality, he said. "If I was walking by, and they wanted to be immature and make comments, I'd keep walking," said Ayanbadejo, who has a 1-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter with his longtime girlfriend. If they wanted to be real men and have conversations, I would have, but no one did. If those players had heard Ayanbadejo's story, they would have learned how his views were shaped. His father is Nigerian, and his mother is Irish-American, and he was given the first name Oladele, which translates to "wealth follows me home." But for much of his childhood, that did not ring true. Ayanbadejo's parents separated when he was 3, and his mother, Rita, took him and his older brother Obafemi from Nigeria to a two-bedroom apartment in a drug-infested housing project in Chicago. Ayanbadejo looked forward to the first day of each month, when Rita would come home with milk, cheese and cereal she had purchased with food stamps. They ate Thanksgiving dinners at the Boys and Girls Club, and their Christmas gifts came from local charities. The size of Ayanbadejo's heart was evident. Once he brought an injured squirrel home to care for it. "The good part about living there was you were around every kind of person you could imagine," Ayanbadejo said. Differences didn't matter, because we all had struggles. When Ayanbadejo was 10, his family moved to Santa Cruz, Calif., where they lived in the on-campus apartment of a family friend who attended the University of California-Santa Cruz. Ayanbadejo began going by his middle name, Brendon, to fit in. He starred for Santa Cruz High School's football team, but he was also active in theater, rode a skateboard and befriended many openly gay students. He had been accepted as a biracial boy from a Chicago housing project, so he accepted everyone else's differences, too, he said. "He just had a new lease on life there," said Ayanbadejo's sister, Rosalinda Sanford. Ayanbadejo became a standout linebacker at U.C.L.A. and was also involved in social causes. When some Los Angeles-area schools cut their arts budgets, Ayanbadejo and some friends began teaching theater at elementary schools three days a week. In 1998, after California Proposition 209, which barred the state from using racial preferences, went into effect, Ayanbadejo worked to publicize the diminished number of minority students at U.C.L.A. "They were basically saying, If you're an athlete at U.C.L.A., it's O.K. to be black," Ayanbadejo said. It's a state school, and I felt like it had an obligation to represent its demographics. In 2007, Ayanbadejo and the former Bruins point guard Baron Davis formed an organization focused on diversity in higher education. "At U.C.L.A., everyone knew Brendon was different," said his longtime friend Michael Skolnik, the political director for the hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons. Everyone knew the football field was not his ultimate destination. Even though Ayanbadejo was a first-team all-Pacific-10 Conference selection as a senior, he was not selected in the 1999 draft. He bounced from N.F.L. training camps to the Canadian Football League to N.F.L. Europe before signing with the Miami Dolphins in 2003. He ultimately became one of the N.F.L."s top special teams players with the Chicago Bears and the Ravens, and he was selected to three Pro Bowls.