By Marc Lawrence

Friday, Dec 12

The NBA community learned Thursday that Jason Collins has Stage 4 cancer.

Collins, a first-round pick from the 2001 NBA Draft, was an All-Pac 10 player at Stanford before making the jump to the pros. After the 2012–13 season wrapped up, he made headlines for becoming the first publicly gay athlete to play in the NBA. Unfortunately, it was revealed this week that his health is deteriorating at a rapid rate.

“In May I married the love of my life, Brunson Green, at a ceremony in Austin, Texas, that couldn’t have been more perfect. In August, we were supposed to go to the US Open, just as every year, but when the car came to take us to the airport, I was nowhere near ready. And for the first time in decades, we missed the flight because I couldn’t stay focused to pack. I had been having weird symptoms like this for a week or two, but unless something is really wrong, I’m going to push through. I’m an athlete.

“Something was really wrong, though. I was in the CT machine at UCLA for all of five minutes before the tech pulled me out and said they were going to have me see a specialist. I’ve had enough CTs in my life to know they last longer than five minutes and whatever the tech had seen on the first images had to be bad.”

Collins was ultimately diagnosed with Stage 4 glioblastoma, which is considered one of the deadliest forms of brain cancer.

As of right now, Collins is receiving treatment at a clinic in Singapore that offers targeted chemotherapy. He said the goal is to keep fighting until a personalized immunotherapy is made for him.

“Because my tumor is unresectable, going solely with the ‘standard of care’ — radiation and TMZ — the average prognosis is only 11 to 14 months. If that’s all the time I have left, I’d rather spend it trying a course of treatment that might one day be a new standard of care for everyone,” Collins continued.

“I’m fortunate to be in a financial position to go wherever in the world I need to go to get treatment. So, if what I’m doing doesn’t save me, I feel good thinking that it might help someone else who gets a diagnosis like this one day.”

Keep him in your prayers, and my dear good friend Jim Feist, too.

The world needs good people like Jim.