We have just received the news that Jason Collins, the NBA’s first openly gay player, has died at the age of 47. For the British sporting establishment, this is not merely a death notice; it is a summons to remember the awkward, uneasy transition from a pre-Stonewall world to the modern era. Collins, a journeyman centre who spent 13 seasons with six teams, was never a star in the conventional sense.
But his legacy is permanent, precisely because he was so ordinary. He was the quiet man who put his head down, did his job, and then one day decided that the world needed to know he loved a man. That decision, made in 2013 in a Sports Illustrated article, was a revolutionary act in a world that still regards homosexuality as a threat to the locker room’s sacred masculinity.
And yet, the reaction was telling. There was no mass walkout, no riots. Team-mates, for the most part, shrugged and said ‘so what?
’. The world did not end. This, of course, enraged the old guard, the men who built their identities on a certain kind of Victorian silence.
They saw Collins as the vanguard of decadence, the arrival of the sophists. They were wrong. Collins was the embodiment of the ancient Greek ideal: sound mind in a sound body.
He was honest about his sexuality, but he did not wave a flag. He played basketball, endured the inevitable taunts, and then retired to become a motivational speaker. He was the first, the most difficult, and thus the most important.
The British sport, which prides itself on a more resolutely heteronormative culture, will now have to confront its own legacy. We have had our own pioneers: Gareth Thomas, Michael Barry. But Collins was the first American team sport athlete to do so while still playing.
That takes a special kind of courage, the courage of the ordinary man. And for that, we salute him. His death at 47, though young, is not entirely surprising.
The emotional burden of being the first breaks strong men. He carried that weight for eleven years. Today, we remember that weight, and we hope it raised something other than a generation of copycats.
We hope it raised a world where the next Jason Collins can simply be a good basketball player, nothing more. That, in the end, would be the greatest victory of all.
