Receiver Stafford lauds Kaepernick’s courage
‘He’s our modern-day Muhammad Ali,’ CFLer says of ex-pivot’s principled stand
Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.
It’s Nike’s new ad campaign, featuring National Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick.
Or, at least, he was an NFL quarterback, before his choice to kneel during the playing of The Star-Spangled Banner in protest of racial inequality and violence led to him becoming a polarizing force in society, never mind sports.
And the Eskimos locker-room, it seems, is no different.
“Honestly, I’m happy for him,” said Eskimos receiver Kenny Stafford. “He’s replacing a love for the campaign and it’s good to see a company like Nike — one of the power companies, major athletic companies — stand behind something.
“And Nike’s always been the first to do something different: Tiger Woods being a black guy, being the head of their golf line; you’ve got the Williams sisters with tennis; you’ve got Michael Jordan. In the beginning, they rolled the dice on Michael Jordan. Who thought Michael Jordan was going to be Michael Jordan? Nike’s always been on the forefront of doing something different, so it was good to see.”
A two-minute commercial narrated by the former San Francisco 49ers star was unveiled on his Twitter feed and will air during Thursday’s NFL season-opener between the Atlanta Falcons and the defending Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles.
“But I’m sad in a way because I don’t know if his football career is done. You don’t know what happens with that because I know he still wants to play football,” said Stafford. “But he’s traded in his cleats for something he’s standing up for.
“I would say he’s our modernday Muhammad Ali when you think about it. He’s not liked for what he’s standing for, but he’s still standing for it and he’s paying the price right now with his career.”
To Stafford, the sacrifice was obvious, as Kaepernick has been reduced to suing the NFL for allegedly colluding to keep him off of their rosters.
He’s replacing a love for the campaign and it’s good to see a company like Nike — one of the power companies, major athletic companies — stand behind something.
“I think he knew going into it what the risks were, I didn’t think it would be to this magnitude, to be completely honest,” Stafford said.
“All 32 teams, you can’t tell me he can’t be a first stringer to a secondstring backup quarterback.
“But it’s good to see (the campaign).
“Me being an American citizen in Canada, I live here now, it’s good to see south of the border trying to bring diversity. Especially when I’m up here and I see it on T-shirts,” said Stafford, who was born in Columbus, Ohio, in reference to the Canadian Football League’s Diversity is Strength movement.
“I didn’t like so much the backlash that Nike received from it. It’s just ignorance, man. It’s just pure ignorance.
“Much respect to Nike, much respect to Colin Kaepernick for standing up for what he believes in and bringing attention to those problems and staying strong.
“President Trump is responding and I wonder what the NFL is going to do.”
But to one fellow member of the pro-quarterback fraternity, an athlete’s sacrifice — even one that could mean no longer being a professional athlete — doesn’t compare to some more real-world examples.
“There’s a lot of people that sacrifice a hell of a lot more than athletes do,” said Eskimos quarterback Mike Reilly.
“So they can, I guess, use that slogan if they want to.
“Guys sacrifice to play this game. They sacrifice their bodies and sacrifice time with family and things like that, but everybody sacrifices things like that.
“People that work normal jobs sacrifice time away from their families to earn a living. If you’re going to compare a sacrifice that any of us make to anybody in the military, then you’re dead wrong.
“So, I’m not sure exactly what they’re trying to get to with that, but I’ll leave that to them to explain.
“But any sacrifice anybody out here makes is not even comparable to anybody that’s in the armed services, so I’m not even going to go there with that comparison.”
The belief that Colin Kaepernick could ruin football has survived for longer than expected.
This is a sport that has carried on in the face of much adversity, the most serious of which was the revelation in recent years that playing football dramatically increases the risk of long-term debilitating injury. It and the NFL in particular are such a significant part of the culture in North America that even this has been largely overlooked. Loss of cognitive function, you say? But it’s Sunday and please pass the nachos.
But Kaepernick and those who followed his lead in using the moment of the U.S. national anthem to protest racial injustice are frequently held up as a much more grave threat to the football business. Everyone, from U.S. President Donald Trump to talkshow hosts to random Twitter eggs, has insisted players who “disrespect” the anthem — their word, not mine — will cause fans to flee football by the millions.
The actual evidence of this happening has not materialized. Television ratings have dropped in recent seasons, but football has done quite well relative to the steep declines across broadcast networks.
And now the NFL, thanks to the actions of one of its major corporate sponsors, finds itself with the anthem controversy inflamed — in some cases literally this time — again.
It all leads to an existential question, one that isn’t just about football, but is about the United States in 2018. Everyone knows that country is sharply divided right now. But is it a 50-50 split between those who still consider themselves proudly pro-Trump and those who do not or is the rabidly pro-Trump slice of the pie smaller than that? Are the people who work themselves into a lather about kneeling football players really representative of a large swath of the population or are they more of a vocal rump?
Nike, it would seem, is placing a very large bet on the latter.
Nothing that has unfolded since Nike unveiled its new ad, with Kaepernick as the centrepiece, could have been a surprise to executives at the sporting goods giant.
The social media outcry, with the burning of Nike shoes and socks and the dreaded boycott hashtag, was as inevitable as the Buffalo Bills having problems at quarterback. It does make you wonder what would have happened if it was, say, Ford that put the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback in its ads. Would the people burning their Air Jordans be taking a sledgehammer to their F-150s?
And so there have been the stories about the drop in the company’s stock and the Twitter posts of people furiously carving the Nike swoosh off their garments, presumably while humming The Star- Spangled Banner as a majestic bald eagle soars overhead.
It’s the kind of thing that brands — sorry, #brands — generally try to avoid. Every time some airline falls into a social media boycott pit, as airlines tend to do since they are singularly adept at angering their customers, the company scrambles to apologize and stem the online tide.
What’s striking in the Nike case is that the marketers brought this on themselves. Consider that the NFL, a multibillion-dollar business controlled by a bunch of insanely wealthy individuals, has repeatedly been spooked by the whole idea of players protesting during the anthem. The league rewrote its rules in the spring to effectively ban kneeling, only to relent when the players insisted they had a right to be consulted on such changes. Various reports, from ESPN and other outlets, have said over the last year that many NFL owners have been terrified of losing business over the anthem-related controversies. And, of course, Kaepernick himself remains out of a job for the second straight season, even though he is plainly good enough to be on an NFL roster. That’s the crux of the Nike ad, in fact, which features his face and the words “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” The thing he sacrificed, it turned out, was his career. None of the NFL’s 32 teams have offered him a job since he became the face of the player protests, this despite a resume that included playoff success at the game’s most important position.
As has been pointed out many times since Kaepernick launched a lawsuit that alleges the NFL’s owners colluded to keep him out of the league, every week of games provides a blooper reel of plays from actual employed quarterbacks that makes a convincing case for the plaintiff. But the teams would rather give jobs to luminaries like Cody Kessler, Nathan Peterman and Jeff Driskel (note: actual people!) than risk any part of a potential Kaepernick backlash. The anthem issue worries the NFL enough that ESPN, under a new president, has assured it that it won’t show the anthem as part of its Monday night broadcasts, lest anyone be caught kneeling or raising a fist or something else that could spark a presidential tweetstorm.
And yet here comes Nike, which sells a range of fungible products and is much more likely to be boycotted than a football league, to make a public stand with the guy the NFL doesn’t want, and to bet there is more to be gained in the long term by absorbing the blast from Trump and his allies in the short term.
Nike, hardly a paragon of corporate virtue, must have researched and focus-grouped this move to death. I am curious to know what it told them.
Nothing that has unfolded since Nike unveiled its new ad, with Kaepernick as the centrepiece, could have been a surprise to executives.