Jason Collins’s announcement that he’s gay didn’t lead off the 11:00 news, wasn’t story #2, in fact didn’t come until 11:08 on the station I was watching. At which point we got about a minute of former coaches and teammates (he used to play for the Nets) saying what a great guy he is and how they support him. For the negative side, all they could find was one NFL player tweeting that with all the beautiful women in the world he didn’t get why guys were interested in guys. The haters appeared on the Sports Illustrated website comments, of course, but haters appear in the comments to every story like ants at a picnic. And there was one ESPN commentator who said that Collins is “walking in open rebellion to God” and was told to shut his pie-hole by none other than Karl Malone, who twenty years ago didn’t want to play against Magic Johnson after Magic admitted he had AIDS. People do change.
It’ll be interesting to see if Collins, who’s a free agent, gets signed for next season, maybe by a team thinking about a whole demographic they could grab — gay men, the way Houston thought about Asians when they signed Jeremy Lin. Meanwhile, it makes Mike Rice calling his Rutgers players “faggots” look even more moronic, doesn’t it?
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