Fans scramble to be the first to claim they don’t care about Jason Collins retiring

Former New Jersey Nets & Brooklyn Nets center Jason Collins announced his retirement Wednesday morning through Sports Illustrated, before an official press conference at Barclays Center Wednesday night ahead of the Nets-Bucks game. Predictably, fans, lots of fans, took to social media to ask why Jason Collins retiring was news, or why anyone cared, because they absolutely don’t care about this non-news.

Of course, Collins’s retirement is news, for the very reason most people want to claim it’s not news: Collins was a trailblazer in modern American sports. Even if he was a PR move at worst and Jackie Robinson’s complete antithesis, and his ability to play professional basketball without torpedoing the very sport and destroying the Nets locker room, was both completely unsurprising and absolutely necessary. Collins has been cited by college athletes as helping them with their own coming out, such as University of Massachusetts guard Derrick Gordon. Collins willing to walk where no one else had in NBA history, and make the world a better and more inclusive place.