This week NBA basketball center, Jason Collins, announced in Sports Illustrated, “I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay.”
This statement was the first outing for a major professional athlete and considered courageous by nearly everyone. Rarely a starter Jason Collins played with the Celtics and Wizards this season, his 12th in the NBA, and the commentators on radio and TV cruelly stated that Jason Collins was a player deep on the bench and that no one had known his name before this event.
For anyone to hide who they are is a struggle and Jason Collins said, “I realized I needed to go public when Joe Kennedy, my old roommate at Stanford and now a Massachusetts congressman, told me he had just marched in Boston’s 2012 Gay Pride Parade. I’m seldom jealous of others, but hearing what Joe had done filled me with envy. I was proud of him for participating but angry that as a closeted gay man I couldn’t even cheer my straight friend on as a spectator.”
Bravo, Jason, don’t listen to those talking heads say that you were never a player of consequences.
None of them ever played in the NBA.
They never competed in two NBA finals.
You are now who you are.
Congratulations.