Jason Collins, NBA’s first openly gay player, dies aged 47

7 minutes agoShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleSareen Habeshian

Former pro-basketball player Jason Collins, the first active male athlete on a major American professional team sport to come out as gay, has died aged 47.

Collins died after a valiant fight with glioblastoma, his family said in a statement shared by the National Basketball Association (NBA).

The sports veteran announced last year that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer and was undergoing treatment to stop the spread of the inoperable disease.

“Jason Collins’ impact and influence extended far beyond basketball as he helped make the NBA, WNBA and larger sports community more inclusive and welcoming for future generations,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said on Tuesday.

‘A monster with tentacles’ – basketball star reveals brain cancer diagnosis

“Jason will be remembered not only for breaking barriers, but also for the kindness and humanity that defined his life and touched so many others,” Silver added.

Collins said in December 2025 that the cancer was discovered after he was struggling to focus.

The brain tumour, he said, was like “a monster with tentacles spreading across the underside of my brain the width of a baseball”.

Without treatment, he would be dead within three months, doctors told Collins.

When revealing his diagnosis to the world, he said it reminded him of his decision to publicly come out as gay in 2013 in a front-page cover story for Sports Illustrated. The years since were “the best of my life”, he said.

“Your life is so much better when you just show up as your true self, unafraid to be your true self, in public or private. This is me. This is what I’m dealing with.”

Collins was being treated with a drug called Avastin to slow the tumour’s growth, and had been travelling to Singapore for a targeted form of chemotherapy.

The California native played for six teams in his 13 seasons in the NBA. He had previously been featured on Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people list. He retired in 2014.

“Jason changed lives in unexpected ways and was an inspiration to all who knew him and to those who admired him from afar,” his family said on Tuesday.

He started his coming out essay for Sports Illustrated in 2013, by writing: “I’m a 34-year-old N.B.A. center. I’m Black and I’m gay.”

He was a free agent at the time the essay was published, and so it remained unclear whether coming out would end his NBA career.

While there were significant developments for the gay rights movement by then, gay marriage was not legalized across the US until 2015.

Collins went on to re-join the New Jersey Nets, where he started his career, and became the first openly-gay athlete to ever play across any of the major four US sports leagues.

United States