Jason Collins, whose April 2013 announcement that he is gay changed the landscape of American professional sports and who last February became the first openly gay male athlete to play in one of the U.S.'s four major team sports leagues, has retired from professional basketball after 830 regular- and postseason games for six NBA teams over 13 pro seasons.
After spending several months untethered following his landmark announcement, Collins caught on with the Brooklyn Nets after the 2013-14 All-Star break, inking a 10-day contract (eventually extended for the remainder of the season) to bring his decidedly unflashy game — all hard screens, physical play in the post, easy-bucket-canceling fouls and consistent communication on the back line — to a veteran-laden team helmed by former teammate Jason Kidd that needed another big body to soak up minutes during a second-half playoff push. When the Nets' season ended at the hands of the Miami Heat in the second round of the playoffs, Collins became a free agent; now, with suitors for a groundbound 35-year-old limited-minutes bruiser seemingly scarce, he's decided to move on.
As he did when he came out, Collins announced his retirement — or, rather, that he plans to officially retire prior to Wednesday's matchup between the Nets and Kidd's new team, the Milwaukee Bucks — in a first-person essay published by Sports Illustrated:
On Wednesday at the Barclays Center, I plan to announce my retirement as an NBA player. The day will be especially meaningful for me because the Nets will be playing the Bucks, who are coached by Jason Kidd, my former teammate and my coach in Brooklyn. It was Jason who cheered my decision to come out by posting on Twitter: “Jason’s sexuality doesn’t change the fact that he is a great friend and was a great teammate."
Considering all the speculation about problems I might face within the locker room, Jason’s support was significant. It had been argued that no team would want to take on a player who was likely to attract a media circus from the outset and whose sexuality would be a distraction. I’m happy to have helped put those canards to rest. The much-ballyhooed media blitz to cover me unscrambled so quickly that a flack jokingly nicknamed me Mr. Irrelevant.
It's true that Collins' sexual preference and locker-room presence went from earth-shattering to non-issue in record time, but that doesn't mean the "why is this news?" contingent was right to cluck. While Collins wasn't a major on-court contributor in Brooklyn on the court, that certainly doesn't mean he didn't make a difference.
The support he received from a broad array of stars, both within the sports world and outside it — and, more importantly, within the Nets locker room — helped puncture pearl-clutching concerns about the "distractions" that some feared might overwhelm a team that signed an an openly gay athlete. And when the response was less supportive — whether coming from one "knucklehead" opponent, athletes in other sports, TV talking heads or the noted good samaritans at the Westboro Baptist Church — Collins just shrugged off the static and kept moving forward. (Marching forward, actually.)
All of a sudden, how a slew of big-ticket items — race, sexuality, masculinity, tolerance, ignorance, acceptance, locker-room dynamics, etc. — related to one another, and how we related to them, were being broadly discussed on broadcast and cable TV, in print, and even on "Oprah." Collins' No. 98 jersey — a number he'd begun wearing before coming out, while a member of the Boston Celtics and Washington Wizards, as a quiet tribute to the late Matthew Shepard, became one of the NBA's most popular sale items, and a source of additional funds for two LGBT-focused charities, including the foundation Shepard's family runs in his memory.
And while Collins put up predictably pedestrian numbers in Brooklyn, averaging just 1.1 points, 0.9 rebounds and 1.4 personal fouls committed in 7.8 minutes per game over 22 appearances for the Nets, he was able to just keep doing what he'd always done, ever since he was a standout at Stanford. That, quiet as it's kept, might be as newsworthy an element as any to come out of this story, as Collins wrote in a first-person piece for The Player's Tribune:
Everybody wanted to know what it’s like to play in a game as an openly gay man in the NBA. From the moment I stepped onto the court to the moment the final buzzer sounded — it was the same as my previous 12 years.
I was locked in. Nothing was different. I did what I always do. Being gay certainly didn’t affect how I played. I tipped rebounds to teammates, tried to de-cleat opponents with my screens, and I did my best to make life miserable for the opposing big. When the ball tipped off, I realized something that I wish I could instill in every single coach, GM, and player reading this.
IT’S STILL JUST BASKETBALL.
Amen.
In the micro sense, Collins changed sports by putting an actual face — and a familiar, smiling one, at that — on the theoretical, intangible bogeyman that was The Distracting Gay Athlete. In the macro sense, he made it easier — not altogether easy, of course, but easier — for other gay athletes to show their true faces, too, opening the door for the likes of Michael Sam, Chip Sarafin and Derrick Gordon.
"When Jason came back to the league, that's when I started to build a little more confidence about myself," Gordon, a 22-year-old UMass guard, said after coming out publicly back in April. "If the NBA can accept him, then everything is going to be fine in my book."
That's why Collins earned recognition as one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People — not merely for the impact he's already had, but for what's still to come, the people he'll continue to inspire. For the lives that will be changed, the struggles eased, the burdens lightened by his decision to, in his words, "be [his] true authentic self."
"When we get to the point where a gay pro athlete is no longer forced to live in fear that he’ll be shunned by teammates or outed by tabloids, when we get to the point where he plays while his significant other waits in the family room, when we get to the point where he’s not compelled to hide his true self and is able to live an authentic life, then coming out won’t be such a big deal," Collins wrote. "But we’re not there yet."
No, but we're closer than we've ever been before, and that's due in large part to Jason Collins being brave enough to tell the world who he is. It's not a scoring title, a Most Valuable Player trophy or a championship ring, but that's one hell of a legacy for any athlete to leave behind.
No comments:
Post a Comment