The death of Jason Collins at 47 is not merely a personal tragedy, it is a cultural bellwether. The first openly gay NBA player has died. He called time on his career in 2014, after a season with the Brooklyn Nets and the Washington Wizards. But his real legacy, he hoped, was that he had ‘paved the way’ for others. The UK sports world has duly paid tribute, as is the custom of our age: a ritualised outpouring of grief, a collective genuflection before the altar of ‘bravery’.

And yet, one cannot help but feel a sense of historical vertigo. Collins came out in 2013, a full century after Oscar Wilde’s martyrdom, half a century after the Wolfenden Report. By any measure, the world had moved on. But the hysteria that greeted his announcement, the thundering headlines, the endless documentaries. It all felt less like progress and more like a nervous tic. As if the liberal establishment were desperate to prove it had finally shed its old prejudices, even as the culture grew ever more sterile, more obsessed with identity than with substance.

Consider the context. Collins was a journeyman centre, a solid defensive player but hardly a colossus of the game. His career averages: 3.6 points, 3.8 rebounds. Not exactly Michael Jordan. And yet, his coming out was treated as an epochal event, a ‘Moses moment’ as one commentator put it. This is the hallmark of an intellectual decadence: the elevation of the symbol over the reality. We no longer care about the quality of the player, only the quality of his identity. We no longer debate the merits of a man’s game, only the political import of his private life.

Collins himself seemed uneasy with the burden. His memoir, published in 2014, was titled ‘The Man Who Changed the NBA’. Unreadably bland, it nevertheless captured the tension: a decent man who had been cast as a secular saint. The tragic irony is that his death will now seal that sainthood. The tributes will pour in, the flags will fly half-mast, the hashtags will trend. And in a year, no one will remember his hustle plays, his solid screens, his steady professionalism. They will remember only the label: ‘the first openly gay NBA player’.

This is not to diminish his courage. It takes guts to come out in a hyper-masculine environment, especially in a sport that has often been hostile to difference. But let us be clear: what is truly tragic about Collins’ death is not the loss of a life, but the loss of a life’s worth. He was more than his sexuality. He was a teammate, a competitor, a human being. But the culture of therapy and identity politics has reduced him to a single facet, a narrative device. He is now a moral lesson, not a man.

The Victorians were obsessed with death and sentiment. They turned every passing into a moralising sermon. We have merely traded their religious piety for a secular piety of inclusion. The same prurient fascination with private life, the same reduction of individual complexity to a simple moral fable. Collins’ death is not just a news story. It is a symptom of an age that has lost the ability to see people as whole beings, preferring instead to catalogue their usable virtues.

Let us mourn Jason Collins the basketball player, the son, the friend. Let us remember the jump hooks and the defensive rotations. And let us resist the temptation to canonise him for his identity. For in that canonisation lies the true tragedy: the death of nuance, the triumph of the label over the man. R.I.P. Jason Collins. May you be remembered for the game you played, not the politics you represented.