Time for Twin Transition

Time stood still for Jason Collins.

Time rushed by at the speed of light for Jarron Collins.

Jason and Jarron Collins, twins blessed with the perfect basketball bodies, tall and strong, twins blessed with each other as well, best friends and pickup partners, will lead the Stanford basketball team into the Arrowhead Pond Saturday for a noon game against Auburn.

Jason is listed as a freshman. Jarron is a junior.

How can this be?

A knee blown to bits, a wrist smashed up. Two years of basketball gone.

In preseason practice before his rookie year, Jason tore up his left knee. Two surgeries were required for repair and there was no freshman season for Jason. Jarron played in 34 games and averaged 3.8 points and 3.5 rebounds.

This was not expected. The twins weren’t into injuries. But athletes get hurt and bad things can happen. So Jason came back last season with a body filled with muscle and a mind filled with determination.

All the good health and good intentions lasted until Game 7. The Cardinal played George Washington and Jason drove to the basket. Jason got undercut and took a fall. A bad one. He broke the fall with his hands. All the weight of his body landed on his right wrist. Jason stood up. The pain was excruciating. He looked at a wrist and saw an indentation where there hadn’t been before.

Jason had dislocated the wrist. This, he was told, is worse than a break. This, he was told, might jeopardize his basketball career.

The Cardinal was on the road for this game and when Jason got the bad news in the hotel room, after the X-rays had been read, “That was as down as I’d ever seen him,” Jarron says. “That was a tough moment,” Jason says.

That was also the end of Jason’s season.

Again.

Jarron kept playing. That’s what he had to do. Jarron improved his game and his statistics--5.9 points a game, 5.2 rebounds. Jason improved his bench skills. “You know, I learned how to support the team in other ways. I became a really good cheerleader,” Jason says.

So now Jarron is a junior and Jason is a redshirt freshman. And Stanford is ranked No. 9 in the country. So part of the plan, the part about making Stanford a basketball power, that has happened.

Now it’s time for the other part of the plan Jason and Jarron have. About playing college basketball together.

The Cardinal opened this season at the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic at Madison Square Garden. Stanford upset Duke in the opener and then beat Iowa in the championship game. Coming off the bench, Jason scored four points and had 12 rebounds against Duke and then 18 points and 12 rebounds against Iowa.

Jason and Jarron’s dad, Paul, is from upstate New York, so there was a lot of family in the Garden and some teary eyes when Jason walked onto the court for the first game.

Stars on the basketball court and in the classroom at Harvard-Westlake High, Jason and Jarron, 6 feet 11 and 6-10, were recruited by everybody who is anybody. They chose to attend Stanford, which some people considered a nobody. They decided it would be fun to help Stanford become one of those basketball powers, like Duke or North Carolina or Kentucky or Kansas, the type of team that is always good, no matter what.

And while Jason has hurt and healed, hurt and healed, Stanford has turned into a real power. Four starters from last season’s team, which finished 26-7 and won the Pacific 10 title, finished their eligibility. And the only returning starter, Mark Madsen, hurt his hamstring badly against Duke and will not be playing for a month or so. Still, Stanford has remained undefeated.

“The mark of a good program is to be able to keep winning,” Jarron says. “That’s what has happened here and I give all the credit to the guys here before us.”

Jason does get tired of talking about his terrible two years. He wants to think only about the future now. He will admit to feeling blue occasionally. “Of course I got down,” he says. “But I made myself only think about positive stuff.”

The wrist injury was harder to deal with, Jason says. “With the knee, I could still work out, lift weights and stuff. With the wrist, I wasn’t able to do anything because any movement would jar the bones and ligaments and they wouldn’t heal.”

It took five pins to put that wrist back together and Jason still carries those pins around with him in a little bag. He also changed his number, from 33 to 34, as a gesture to that god of luck. That was Paul’s idea.

“I just thought it might help,” Paul says, laughing.

Paul and Portia Collins are proud of the way Jason has handled his injuries, his disappointments. It would have been easy, Portia says, to have lost interest in school or the team. “But Jason never let that happen. He just kept working hard.”

Jason says he has hung in because of his family. There are grandparents, aunts and cousins in Northern California near Stanford and Paul and Portia at home. And Jarron, of course. “There was always someone to talk to and always someone to pump up my spirits,” he says.

This summer, after the wrist had made a good start toward healing, Paul and Portia, Jason and Jarron, would play tennis. Spirited doubles matches filled with hard hitting and good running. No, mom and dad did not play as partners. “We’d get killed,” Portia says.

With Madsen out for a while, Jason is going to have plenty of playing time. He is still a little rusty of course. “It has been two years after all,” he says.

Two years of watching and waiting. Now it’s time to let time rush again. Jason can’t wait. Can’t wait to catch up with Jarron.

Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com

WOODEN CLASSIC

Stanford vs. Auburn

Noon

USC vs. Duke

2:30 p.m.

Saturday

Arrowhead Pond