We interrupt this column for other breaking-news
developments: The world did not come to an end yesterday, and the sun rose in
the east and set in the west. Also, we’re reliably informed by our sources at
the Federal Aviation Administration that all airliners departing from U.S.
airports landed safely at their destinations. And, closer to home, Fido bit a
mailman on Main Street. Back to you, Sam, for more details on the
not-so-shocking story about the gay basketball player.
Had Collins’s admission occurred at almost any other
point in our nation’s collective past psyche—say a decade or even a year ago—it
might have been a shocking, even frightening moment. But it didn’t, and so it
wasn’t.
Sports fans and social observers knew it was only a
matter of time before the first professional male athlete jumped out of the
closet while still wearing a team uniform. Now that it has happened, however,
it feels oddly anticlimactic. No shouts or curses, only cheers and the proud
affirmation that something that loomed so fearsome over our cultural landscape
could be, in the end, not nearly as disruptive as it appeared just a few years
earlier.
In a justice-is-served way, that’s how it should be.
Collins isn’t a high-profile basketball player. He’s not flashy. Outside of
those who closely follow the game, he might even be considered invisible. He
has played for six teams over his 12-year career, averaging a lackluster 3.6
points and 3.8 rebounds per game. Collins doesn’t enter into fantasy-sports
conversations.
Yet his fame and fortune as a pro baller is about to
change forever. If sports in America are a bellwether for change in our
society, Collins is about to add his face to the pantheon of athletic heroes
who push us toward our better selves.
Of course, some folks disagree. ESPN’s NBA analyst Chris
Broussard, for example, condemned Collins as “openly living in unrepentant sin”
in a broadcast that discussed the announcement.
To be sure, the acid test of Collins’s disclosure
will come over time in fan reactions to seeing an openly gay male basketball
player. But if the immediate and overwhelming public reaction is a clue,
Collins has little to fear and a league full of cheering supporters. ESPN.com
reported the social-media world was quick to latch onto Collins, as his Twitter
account picked up more followers in the hour after Sports Illustrated posted
his story than in his previous 430 days on the site. His followers jumped from
3,700 to more than 9,000 in that hour, and @jasoncollins34 now has nearly
100,000 followers.
Fellow Washington Wizard Emeka Okafor told The New
York Times that Collins is a great teammate and nothing has changed. “He’s the
same guy,” Okafor said. “He’s just let us know more about him.” Other players,
including stars such as the Los Angeles Lakers’s Kobe Bryant and the Oklahoma
City Thunder’s Kevin Durant posted tweets praising Collins’s courage.
Even President Barack Obama, who admitted to
evolving toward supporting marriage equality last year during his presidential
re-election campaign, called Collins to personally say that he was “impressed”
by his willingness to live and play basketball out of the closet.
Collins wants to continue to play and will seek to
sign with a team when his current contract with the Washington Wizards expires
July 1. NBA officials say it’s likely he’ll be in uniform because teammates,
coaches, and team owners will be far less concerned about what he does off the
court and quite eager to have his 7-foot, 255-pound frame snaring rebounds and
clogging the lane.
Unlike other gay men who have played professional
sports, Collins didn’t wait until retirement to make his sexual orientation
public. In 2007 former NBA veteran player John Amaechi became the first
professional basketball player to say he was gay but did so four years after
retiring from the sport. Amaechi praised Collins’s disclosure but called it “a
nonissue” because the public is far more tolerant now than ever before.
“This is a positive,” Amaechi said in a video post
on the sports-related blog BleacherReport.com. “When there is this tipping
point and there are enough people coming together, deciding that change is
necessary, that’s when it happens. I’m hopeful that Jason will be a catalyst in
this process, more so than anyone who’s come before him.”
For those who keep track of such things, Collins’s
announcement is significant only because he’s the first openly gay male athlete
who is an active player on a professional sports team. Surely, that will make
him the Jackie Robinson of the LGBT community—something that Collins seemed to
welcome, albeit reluctantly, in the Sport Illustrated article.
“I want to do the right thing and not hide anymore,”
he said in the article. “I want to march for tolerance, acceptance and
understanding. I want to take a stand and say, ‘Me, too.’”
About the author: Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow
at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines
the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or
ethnic majority by the year 2050.
This article was published by the Center for
American Progress.
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