The life of veteran NBA center Jason Collins is a lot more interesting now than it was last year, with the 34-year-old becoming the first ever openly gay athlete to play in the four major American team sports on Monday. When you also consider the fact that Collins played high school basketball with actor Jason Segel, he may even start to give the Dos Equis guy a run for his money.
SI.com’s Extra Mustard did a little digging and discovered that Segel was teammates with Jason and Jarron Collins at Harvard-Westlake School, where they won back-to-back state championships together in 1996 and 1997. As you might expect, it sounds like Segel was hilarious back then, too.
A 1996 article in the LA Times said that Segel answered to the alias “Doctor Dunk” because of a two-handed dunk he converted with his shirt pulled over his head in an East Coast dunk contest. He supposedly asked for silence from the crowd before executing the slam and then dove head-first into the stands after it was completed.
“I’m not nearly as skilled a basketball player as some of the other guys,” the 6-foot-4 junior said at the time. “But I have a lot of bravado.”
Here is a closer shot of Segel with the Collins brothers:
For more background information on the intriguing life of Jason Collins, be sure to check out our interview with one of his former high school teammates, Rico Cabrera, who was left of Segel in the picture. You may find it just as interesting as the fact that Collins played alongside the star of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.”
