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Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2005 > October > 17 > Entry
Jason Collier, gone too soon
A decade ago, when I was working at the Troy (Ohio) Daily News and barely scraping by on a small newspaper salary, I used to cover high school football and basketball games on the weekends for extra cash. It wasn’t much money — $20 a game before they took out taxes — but it was also fun. This was in largely rural Miami County and I was often covering passionate grudge matches between small school rivals.
And if you go to enough high school games, every once in a while you see something that makes you take notice. Sometimes it’s a kid who’s just a step ahead everyone skill-wise, or a player who just seems to have an innate sense for the game. Or sometimes it’s a kid who is just so much bigger than everyone else that you just sense they are going places.
Jason Collier was 17 the first time I saw him play basketball and he was all of those things and more. Collier, the 7-foot giant who went on to play in the NBA, shockingly died Saturday at age 28.
Anyone who walked in to the old, shadowy Milton-Union High School gym that day 11 years ago would have felt the buzz. I nearly crashed into University of Cincinnati coach Bob Huggins walking to my seat near top of the wooden bleachers. Legendary Indiana coach Bobby Knight was there, too. Other spotted Bobby Cremins, coach of Georgia Tech, and coaches from Ohio State, Notre Dame and a handful of other top college programs. The gym was jam-packed in the tiny rural burg of 6,000 people, many just wanting to see what all the fuss over Collier was about.
Out on the court, Collier warmed up silently, making three-pointer after three-pointer. That was part of the attraction for recruiters. Here was a big guy with a smooth jumpshot who could actually make the long shot. But that strength was later viewed as a weakness once he headed off for college ball at Indiana. Knight hounded Collier for being “soft,” not rebounding enough and not mixing it up inside.
Indiana under the volatile Knight was an odd choice for mild-mannered Collier, and it ultimately proved to be a bad fit. This was the leading edge of Knight’s implosion that led to his firing at Indiana. Collier was a rare Indiana player of that day who refused to put up with Knight’s abuse. Where he led, others would follow until Knight was shown the door. In late 1997, Collier announced he would leave Indiana and narrowed his transfer choices to Georgia Tech, where his dad played college basketball in Atlanta, and the University of Dayton, just down the road from his hometown of Springfield, Ohio. He picked Georgia Tech.
Weridly, had Collier gone to UD, he would have filled a void at center left when Chris Daniels died suddenly just months before in January of 1997. The parallels to Collier’s death are creepy. Daniels, age 22, was just a bit shorter than Collier at 6-foot-10. Like Collier, he has recently undergone an intense conditioning program, gotten into great shape and was playing the best basketball of his career. And like Collier, he awoke gasping for breath in the middle of the night and died of an apparent heart attack.
It made me wonder today whether these incredibly tall men, with uniquely stretched out physiques, aren’t perhaps somehow more physiologically at risk when the put themselves through physical stress. I suppose, it’s just coincidence that Daniels’ and Collier’s stories briefly intersected and later ended so similarly.
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