Former football player dies of a brain tumor at age 47.
Former basketball player Jason Collins, the first athlete in a major U.S. competition to come out as gay, died Tuesday at age 47, the National Basketball Association (NBA) and his family said.
Jason Collins died after a battle with glioblastoma, a brain tumor, detailed the family of the former center, who ended his career in November 2014 while playing for the Brooklyn Nets, a year after announcing his homosexuality.
Collins played a total of 735 games in 13 seasons in the NBA for six different teams, including the Boston Celtics, Washington Wizards, and the Nets, whose New Jersey-based franchise he helped reach the finals in 2002 and 2003.
I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black and I’m gay, the basketball player revealed in April 2013, in an article he wrote for Sports Illustrated magazine in collaboration with writer Franz Lidz.
So, without a club after leaving the Washington Wizards, he became the first openly gay athlete in one of the major North American leagues, across the four main sports (basketball, ice hockey, American football, and baseball).
I didn’t have the ambition to be the first athlete in a major sport in the United States to come out as gay. But now that I have, I’m happy to start the conversation (…). I wish I wasn’t the kid in the classroom who raises their hand to say, ‘I’m different .’ If someone had done that, I would have gone my own way. But nobody did, and that’s why I’m raising my hand,” Collins wrote at the time.
