The Uncommon Bravery of Jason Collins |
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The Uncommon Bravery of Jason Collins
The death of the NBA’s first openly gay player 47 underscores a hard truth: Male professional sports remains hostile terrain for openly queer athletes.
Jason Collins, #98 of the Brooklyn Nets, speaks with the media prior to a game against the Denver Nuggets on February 27, 2014, in Denver, Colorado.
On Wednesday, cancer killed a 47-year-old former NBA player of singular bravery. In hindsight, I don’t think we realized just how courageous he was when he was in the headlines. His name was Jason Collins, and he played 13 years in the league, following an All-American college career at Stanford where he suited up alongside his twin brother, Jarron. Jason Collins, of course, will be remembered as a trailblazer. Not a Portland Trail Blazer but the person who took on the weight of being “a first.” He was the first openly gay, active male athlete in one of the four big sports leagues—NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL—in North America.
Collins came out in 2013, in a beautiful first-person essay written alongside journalist Franz Lidz in Sports Illustrated. “No one wants to live in fear,” Collins wrote. “I’ve always been scared of saying the wrong thing. I don’t sleep well. I never have. But each time I tell another person, I feel stronger and sleep a little more soundly. It takes an enormous amount of energy to guard such a big secret. I’ve endured years of misery and gone to enormous lengths to live a lie. I was certain that my world would fall apart if anyone knew. And yet when I acknowledged my sexuality I felt whole for the first time.”
The boldness of Collins’s statement was also due to its timing. He was a free agent at the tail end of his career and was taking a risk that he would never play again. What team would be the first to sign a gay player? Especially when they could hide behind his advanced age (34) to dodge charges of homophobia? After waiting for 50 games, the Brooklyn Nets finally called, signing him in 2014. Upon joining the team, he wore number 98 in tribute to Matthew Shepard, the gay teen tortured and murdered in a horrific hate crime in 1998.
I contacted Cyd Zeigler, the legendary cofounder of Outsports for comment, and he said to me, “The world knows Jason Collins for coming out, but the LGBTQ community and the NBA family know him for being out. Not just for that historic moment of courage he showed with the........