Jason Collins celebrated as 'a trailblazer' by out LGBTQ athletes
Jason Collins' courage to come out as a gay man playing in the NBA inspired others to live authentically, those who knew him said after his death.
John Amaechi ’s favorite memory of Jason Collins is one for which Collins wasn’t physically present. Not long after Collins became the first openly gay athlete to play in any of the major North American men’s sports leagues in 2013, Amaechi was giving a speech in a city he can’t quite recall – Chicago, maybe – when he met a young man in the audience. He vividly remembers what happened next.
The man told Amaechi, who came out as gay in 2007 after retiring from professional basketball, that he deeply related to Collins’ story. “Not just relating. It was like he was feeding his soul,” Amaechi recalled.
“To watch as somebody is lifted, literally like made more tall and substantial, from listening to what somebody else said, is remarkable. And he was. You could see, even as he recounted the things that he heard, he rose.
That tells you something about a person. ” Collins, a 13-year NBA veteran, died May 12 after an eight-month battle with brain cancer. He was 47.
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