Jason Collins, brain tumor for the former NBA player: he was the first to come out

“A few months ago my family released a deliberately vague statement in which they said I had a tumor. Now it’s time for people to listen to me: I have stage 4 glioblastoma, one of the deadliest forms of brain cancer.” Devastating words spoken to ESPN by Jason Collins, 14 seasons in the NBA as a pivot in six different teams, no trophies in his career but a player highly appreciated everywhere for his defense and physical play in the area. And above all the protagonist of a great victory in civil terms: in 2013 he was the first professional athlete from one of the 4 great American sports leagues (Nba, NFL, NHL and MLB) to come out. A choice supported by the then US president Obama, Kobe Bryant and the entire NBA world.

the disease

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For Collins, the tumor was a bolt from the blue, also because he discovered it a few months after getting married to the film producer Brunson Green. “We were supposed to go to the US Open, but I couldn’t pack my bags. I had a CT scan and they told me I needed a specialist visit. At a certain point I fell at home, suddenly I no longer knew how to turn off an appliance: the tumor was already attacking me. According to my family, I lost my short-term memory and the ability to understand. Glioblastoma is aggressive and difficult to treat because it is surrounded by the brain, a monster with tentacles the size of a baseball.” When they then asked him what it was like to receive all this bad news, Collins showed that he had quite a sense of humor: “I was out of my mind, I don’t remember well. My husband told me in the hospital that I lost the desire to watch tennis and I started to appreciate the quieter Korean TV series.” When Collins came back to his senses after radiotherapy, he did research on his tumor: “I said to myself: ‘Shut up and go play against Shaq’. I played against O’Neal in his prime, and it’s the greatest challenge you can face in basketball, I’m not afraid. We athletes have determination on our side, we don’t reach certain levels by chance. I and the people who love me won’t sit here waiting for the cancer to kill me without first having fought hard. We will hit it for first with therapies still under study”.

the future

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Collins is a giant, he carries around 213 centimeters and 110 kilos of muscles, he is used to being strong but he has no illusions: “My tumor is not operable, so I have to undergo maintenance treatments for which the average prognosis is about a year, from 11 to 14 months. If this is the time I have left, I would like to dedicate it to testing a treatment that could one day become a new standard of care for everyone. I am lucky to have this economic possibility, if what I am doing does not save me It’s nice to think that one day it might help someone else.”