Collins, who on Monday became the first openly gay male athlete still active in a major American team sport, had only recently come out to his family and close friends. He searched for a way to honor, if only to himself, his new identity with the gay community.

He considered 8, the number of the ballot initiative that banned gay marriage in California, but decided against it because it was worn by Antoine Walker, a player he had had conflicts with several times in his career.

He settled on 98, to mark the year that Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming, was killed.

“I wanted to do something that would make a statement, even if I wasn’t really open yet,” Collins said in an interview Tuesday.

His friends wondered what he would say when people asked why he had such a strange number, in a sport where lower numbers are far more common. “It’s the number of a lineman, so I knew people would ask. But I always just said it was to mess with the refs when they called me for fouls.

“I was good with a message for myself, I never needed to be in the spotlight,” he said, interrupting himself with laughter. “I guess I am now.”

To say Collins is in the spotlight would be an understatement. After his essay was posted on the Sports Illustrated Web site on Monday, he received back-to-back phone calls from Oprah Winfrey and President Obama. Collins was so stunned at the call from the White House, he initially thought it might be a practical joke. When an aide pulled out her iPad to show him a clip from the news conference Tuesday, with the president saying he “couldn’t be prouder,” Collins furrowed his brow with a look of disbelief.

“It’s all a little surreal,” he said in an interview in his agent’s office here, his 7-foot frame spilling out of the squat black leather chair. Minutes earlier, he received a supportive message from Elton John, just one of hundreds that have poured in over the last two days.

Shepard’s mother, Judy, has said the family was touched by Collins’s tribute.

 For months now, Collins said, he had planned to come out publicly, but he had been filled with fear at the prospect, worried about negative reaction and the scrutiny that would come from being in the spotlight. But the response to his announcement has been overwhelmingly positive.

“It feels like a Band-Aid has been ripped off,” he said. “There’s been so much support, I just think, why didn’t I do this sooner?”

Collins has taken to describing his path to openly acknowledging his sexual orientation as baking in the oven. In 2009, he called off his engagement, but even then he did not acknowledge that it was because he was gay.

He cited his Christian upbringing as one reason that he struggled with his sexual orientation. While his family was supportive of his gay uncle who had lived with a partner for years in New York City, “there were expectations, even if they were unsaid, that there was a way you were supposed to live.”

“I tried so hard to live to that ideal,” he said. “It took a lot of my energy just to try to live this lie I was creating for myself.”

It was not until the N.B.A. lockout in 2011 that he began to come to terms with being gay.

“All of the sudden my fixation, the thing I put all of myself into, wasn’t there,” he said. The holidays that year were particularly rough, he said. “I just looked at my German shepherd and said I like you, but is this really what I want my life to be? I was putting myself through a lot of misery — it’s confusing and illogical.”