Vince Lombardi would have loved Jason Collins, and everything about him. Collins is bright, professional, respectful, team-centric, and proud to be gay. Right in Lombardi's wheelhouse.

Long before it was fashionable, Lombardi was a champion of gay athletes, if only because he was a champion of all athletes, at least those who helped him score more touchdowns than the other guy. It didn't matter if they were white or black, or if they dated men or women or both, or if they dated interracially or not.

Long before it was fashionable, coach Vince Lombardi was a champion of gay rights. Focus on Sport/Getty Images

"Like the saying goes," Susan Lombardi said by phone, "my father treated them all the same. Like dogs."

Actually, Vincent Thomas Lombardi treated his Green Bay Packers and Washington Redskins as anything but. No, winning wasn't everything, or the only thing. In Lombardi's playbook, winning placed a distant second to simple human decency.

In 1969, the year before his death, the only year he coached the Redskins, Lombardi worked with at least five gay men -- three players and two front-office executives, including David Slattery, who would come out in 1993. In his defining biography, "When Pride Still Mattered," author David Maraniss described the scene of Lombardi charging an assistant to work with one of the gay players, a struggling back named Ray McDonald. "And if I hear one of you people make reference to his manhood," Lombardi is quoted as saying, "you'll be out of here before your ass hits the ground."

This was 44 years before Collins, a 12-year NBA veteran, made history this week as the first active player among the four major American team sports to publicly reveal he is gay. This was 44 years before a basketball coach at Rutgers University was fired, in part, for degrading players with homophobic slurs, and before another coach was accused of using homophobic slurs at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Lombardi's Green Bay.

"My father was way ahead of his time," Susan Lombardi said. "He was discriminated against as a dark-skinned Italian American when he was younger, when he felt he was passed up for coaching jobs that he deserved. He felt the pain of discrimination, and so he raised his family to accept everybody, no matter what color they were or whatever their sexual orientation was.

"I think it's great what Jason Collins did, because it's going to open a lot of doors for people. Without a doubt my father would've embraced him, and would've been very proud of him for coming out."