Jason Collins has offended me.
Collins carved out a chunk of history on Monday when he published a first person article on Sports Illustrated's website revealing that he is gay.
"What's the big deal," some have asked. "People both wildly famous and utterly unknown reveal that they are gay all the time these days." Not people like Jason Collins. The story made headlines across the continent because with his revelation, the journeyman NBA centre became the first player from one of North America's Big Four sports to come out of the closet while still active in the league.
After reading the article I texted my wife the news. She thought it was a typo.
"He's the first?" she asked. "Like, the first first?"
Yes, he's the first first. "Wasn't there that one baseball player or something?"
Nope. No one. It's actually quite amazing. A little quick math reveals that this year alone there are more than 3,600 professional athletes active on NHL, NBA, MLB and NFL rosters. If we take a conservative estimate that three per cent of the male population is gay, that would mean this year alone there are more than 100 gay athletes playing pro sports in North America.
Multiply that by several generations of athletes in those four sports and the number of closeted pro athletes throughout history grows pretty high, pretty quickly.
With the size of those football and basketball players, that would need to be a big closet.
Those numbers, taken alone, make Collins's revelation remarkable.
What really struck me, though, was how beautifully written his piece was. As someone who tries, often quite unsuccessfully, to write columns in a natural, amusing and relaxed way, I was delighted to read Collins's article. It's a great piece of writing - thoughtful, charming and honest. As someone who's agonized over four word phrases and nearly come to blows with inanimate pieces of computer equipment because the blank word documents always refuse to fill themselves up with poetic brilliance, I can attest that it's seldom easy to scrawl charm with a blinking cursor.
Collins, a devoted Christian who co-wrote the piece with journalist Franz Lidz, talked about living life pretending to be a straight man despite knowing from a young age that he was gay.
"I kept telling myself the sky was red, but I always knew it was blue," he wrote. Gay or straight, that description is deep-breath-in great.
So how has Collins offended me? He offended me because his writing is too good. Not only can he do things on a basketball court that a poorly aging shorty like me could never dream of, he can step right into my line of work and do it better than me as well. Facing a writing assignment that was full of so many landmines it should have come with a bomb-sniffing dog, Collins coolly navigated it as if he was flying on a hover bike. This article could have been a clunky, angsty mess - remember Jodie Foster at the Golden Globes? - and no one would have really blamed Collins given the intense circumstances. Instead it was perfect.
So I guess I've misled you a bit (there's that shoddy writing of mine shining through). I'm not really offended at all by Jason Collins, just awed by his courage and envious of his poise.
Once I stopped smiling at the sheer happiness springing off the page, my thoughts moved on from the writing to the message that the piece sent. A chilling number of young people die by suicide and a disproportionately high percentage of them are gay.
Faced with a life that is full of fear, they choose death. Thankfully society continues to move towards tolerance but professional sports was one of the last straight lines that refused to bend.
Then Jason Collins came out, and the sports world didn't implode. Collins is OK. In fact he's more than OK. On the day of his announcement he received congratulatory phone calls from two American presidents. The day after the article Collins said he never felt happier in his life. Words of support came from current and former teammates. Basketball icon Kobe Bryant and former star Tim Hardaway - both of whom not so long ago voiced some very gay-unfriendly things - came out in support of Collins. In the aftermath of the announcement, it was the homophobes, not homosexuals, who felt the wrath of judgment from their peers.
Collins now is a role model, and you couldn't ask for a better one. He's Stanford smart, powerfully strong, tough and, on the court, even a little bit mean. Collins insisted that the article be a first person account so that it would be his words, not the words of some sleazy tabloid, that did the outing.
Now there is one person - not a star but a real pro - that young gay athletes can look at and know that it's OK to be themselves. Of course, the process is far from over. Many cultures, creeds and communities are far less welcoming than what has been shown to Collins so far. High school can be a lonely, vicious place. The gay 16-year-old athlete who comes out at his fundamental religious school, prairie hockey academy or even high achieving North Vancouver high school isn't getting any calls from Barack Obama or Kobe Bryant. The support has to come from somewhere else. Hopefully, now, those kids will have a little more confidence to go find a little more happiness.
I have two young sons who, if I have any sway at all, will play a lot of sports. Whatever level they get to - whether it's the National Hockey League or Neighbourhood Beer League - I like to think that they'd be able to show the same courage as Jason Collins, or the same acceptance as his teammates, if faced with a similar situation.
It's almost a moot point though - by the time they're teens there hopefully will be no need for such pronouncements or courage because the fact that an athlete happens to be gay will raise eyebrows no more than his choice of sneakers.
The Collins article is a great start. Go read it, if you haven't already. It's a charming, positive story of a man finding his way to happiness and it will most certainly make you feel good. If it doesn't, well, maybe you should ask yourself why. [email protected]
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