All week we’ve been talking about Jason Collins, the pro basketball player who made history when he came out as gay. He’s heralded as the first man in a major pro sport to come out, but The Atlantic points out that this isn’t true.

That title belongs to Glenn Burke, a baseball player for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Oakland A’s from 1976 to 1979. Burke was very open with his teammates and even with reporters about his sexuality, but the media just wasn’t ready to talk about it.

Burke made no secret of his sexual orientation to the Dodgers front office, his teammates, or friends in either league. He also talked freely with sportswriters, though all of them ended up shaking their heads and telling him they couldn’t write that in their papers. Burke was so open about his sexuality that the Dodgers tried to talk him into participating in a sham marriage. (He wrote in his autobiography that the team offered him $75,000 to go along with the ruse.) He refused. In a bit of irony that would seem farcical if it wasn’t so tragic, one of the Dodgers who tried to talk Burke into getting “married,” was his manager, Tommy Lasorda, whose son Tom Jr. died from AIDS complications in 1991. To this day, Lasorda Sr. refuses to acknowledge his son’s homosexuality.

Burke, who also died of AIDS-related causes in 1995, came out to the world outside baseball in a 1982 article for Inside Sports and even followed it up shortly after with an appearance on The Today Show with Bryant Gumbel. But his story was greeted by the rest of the news media and the baseball establishment, including Burke’s former teammates and baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, with silence. Even his superb autobiography, Out at Home, which published the year he died, failed to stir open conversation about homosexuality in sports. Practically no one in the sports-writing community would acknowledge that Burke was gay or report stories that followed up on his admission.

This is why history is important. 

Just over a week after basketball player Jason Collins’s historic coming-out, a former college football player has also opened up about being gay.

Kevin Grayson was a football player for the University of Richmond and helped the team win a national title in 2008. An injury kept him from being drafted by the NFL in 2011, but he went on to play pro in Italy. 

“Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you can’t be the athlete you want to be. Doesn’t mean you can’t be a star. Doesn’t mean you can’t go out there and go just as hard as anybody else, if not harder,” Grayson said in an interview with WTVR in Richmond, Va. …

Grayson says he never considered coming out before because he didn’t want to become a distraction for his teammates and preferred to keep his focus on his sport.  “If you are an athlete, you want to be an athlete. You want to be known for what you’ve done on the basketball court, football field, tennis court, whatever. You don’t want to be that person who it’s always ‘the “gay” athlete,’” explains Grayson. “You don’t want to be the focus in that way. Not to say that it’s a negative, but when you have people just asking questions about your sexuality and how teammates are taking it, it takes away from the importance of the preseason.”

However, today Grayson feels differently and hopes by coming out more people will realize an athlete’s sexuality has no impact on his ability to play. “Why can’t I be an athlete? Why can’t I be a star player?” asks Grayson. “Why can’t I be the guy making plays that helps my team win, and still on the flip side, be a gay male?”

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Many congratulations to him, and I hope this means more and more athletes will be stepping up and coming out soon.