A day after the NBA’s Jason Collins came out in a Sports Illustrated essay, his ex-fiancée, from Wayzata, says she didn’t know Collins is gay.
Carolyn Moos, who went to Blake High School, said to TMZ Tuesday that she dated Collins for several years and they were engaged until 2009, when he bailed on an impending wedding. Collins apparently told her over the weekend that he is gay, and that’s why he ended the relationship.
“It’s very emotional for me as a woman to have invested eight years in my dream to have a husband, soul mate, and best friend in him,” Moos tells TMZ. “So this is all hard to understand.”
Collins, a 12-year NBA veteran, made history Monday when his first-person piece hit SI.com, outing himself as the first openly-gay active athlete in major American team sports.
Moos had a professional basketball career of her own, first in France then with the Miami Sol of the WNBA, according to her web site’s bio.
The 6-foot-6 center/forward starred at Blake High, becoming one of six finalists for the Naismith National Player of the Year award in 1997 before playing for Stanford University. One report at WNBA.com had her attending a Lynx training camp in 2003. She now works as a personal trainer and a model.
Collins referred to the relationship in his SI piece, and joked in an interview with ABC News Tuesday morning that he was good at playing straight.
“Calling off the wedding was obviously a tough decision but it was the right one, because I knew I wasn’t getting married for the right reasons,” he said to George Stephanopoulos. “I still love her to this day. She’s a great person and– but as far as doing what was right for both of us, it was the right decision.”
Moos, for her part, tells TMZ, “I care about [Jason] tremendously and only want the best for him. I want Jason to be happy for a lifetime and stay true to who he really is, inside and out.”
