Kaepernick saga is about much more than football
UNEMPLOYED QUARTERBACK EARNS KUDOS FOR TAKING STANCE, YET REMAINS TOXIC FOR NFL TEAMS
They raised t heir fists a nd lifted signs, shouted words of support for Colin Kaepernick and words of shame toward the National Football League.
Hundreds gathered late last month for a rally in support of the most talkedabout man i n American sports, a man who wasn’t there to speak about himself.
And maybe that last part doesn’t matter anymore.
“He’s out there kneeling for my son and your son and my daughter,” Symone Sanders remembered one of the speakers saying.
Sanders, the former press secretary for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign — and an organizer of the Kaepernick rally at the NFL’s midtown Manhattan headquarters — believed she would remember that feeling for a long time.
“The crowd was just overtaken with emotion at that moment, and everybody understood this was absolutely bigger than Colin Kaepernick.”
A little more than a year ago, Kaepernick became one of the most polarizing figures in U. S. sports when he took a knee during the national anthem. It was a unique and jarring form of protest against police brutality toward African- Americans.
“If they take football away, I know that I stood for what is right,” he told NFL Network in August 2016, during the kind of interview that has become increasingly rare in the year since.
Sure enough, that seems to be exactly what happened.
With the NFL kicking off a new season without Kaepernick on a team roster, it’s possible the protest cost him his playing career. The 29-year-old quarterback led the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl following the 2012 season, and while his statistics have declined since, his performance — he threw 16 touchdown passes last season against four interceptions — would seem to warrant a job somewhere in the league.
“No one wants to deal with that,” said an owner of one of the league’s 32 franchises, none of which offered Kaepernick a contract this off-season. The owner spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The estrangement is in keeping with most everything else about the young man’s life.
At just the latest of many crossroads, Kaepernick is a lifelong resident of the inbetween — not exactly a football player and not quite an activist. He’s refused the past eight months to appear publicly or conduct interviews, including for this story. He is a biracial man who grew up in a white family; a child of privilege who became a warrior for social justice; an introspective soul who couldn’t resist his callings to the most public stages.
“One day, maybe my youngest, who is in second grade, is going to open up a history book and he’ l l read about Colin,” said Phil Sanchez, Kaepernick’s former high school guidance counsellor. “And it won’t have anything to do with throwing a touchdown.”
His stance is now a heated rallying cry on both sides of the political aisle. His No. 7 49ers jersey is still one of the bestselling in a league that will not have him and a memento to burn by fans who don’t want him. Kaepernick is more than just an athlete these days. He is a symbol and a dramatic example, either the second coming of Muhammad Ali — the legendary boxer who shook up the national conversation by refusing a draft assignment to Vietnam — or a spoiled athlete who refused to stick to sports and oblige a culture that allowed him three years ago to sign a US$126-million contract.
He is, on either end of an extreme spectrum, a figure who generates passion and devotion, the author of a movement that has grown larger and more heated than perhaps even Kaepernick thought it would.
“He had no idea how big it was going to get,” said Nate Boyer, an ex- Green Beret who has occasionally communicated with Kaepernick over the past year.
Football l ocker- rooms tend to be America in a single room: a blend of races, backgrounds and belief systems. In which corner, Kaepernick wondered, did he belong? He was a young African- American with a white family, a product of the central California suburbs.
He joined a traditionally African- American fraternity and found himself drawn to his black teammates with the Nevada Wolf Pack. But his skin tone and middleclass dialect gave him away, and a few of Kaepernick’s new friends sometimes referred to him as “whitewashed.”
“A lot of white people are racist toward him,” former Nevada offensive lineman John Bender said, “but a lot of black people are racist toward him, too.”
Bender, who remains close withKae per nick, thought about it and continued: “He’s kind of on the fence here, in between.”
Unable to find himself, he drifted in the locker- room with a different objective: If his story was unique and unrelatable, he would learn theirs, struggle and experience absorption — the only way he knew to connect.
“You could just kind of see him working through that identity and feeling compelled to relate,” said Tyler Lantrip, a former Nevada quarterback who was Kaepernick’s roommate during road trips.
The years passed, and Kaepernick found purpose in the exercise; if he could understand the journeys of others, perhaps he could feel more at ease with his own.
After he mastered the Nevada locker- room, absorbing its stories and developing a compassion-based leadership teammates would recall years later, he moved on — working at the Reno Boys and Girls Club and, after the 49ers drafted him in 2011, asking old friends and former coaches what they needed.
Once, a former Pitman coach said, he casually mentioned to Kaepernick about an underprivileged school he’d visited; before l ong Kaepernick had arranged for a truck to be loaded with Nike gear and off-loaded at a school he’d never been to. All he asked in return was for the former coach to keep his generosity a secret.
And that became one of his things: He loved football, but it was the fame he sometimes struggled with. He sometimes came off as aloof or difficult to reporters, withdrawing further after a columnist criticized Kaepernick’s tattoos and compared his appearance with that of a prison inmate. The young player with the household name and cocky finishing move — “Kaepernicking” was the celebratory act of kissing those tattooed biceps — seemed to blanch in the spotlight.
Seen by some friends as an introvert, he passed on the bar crowds and preferred to read — books about colonialism, black empowerment and feminism seemed to strike a chord — or invite friends to his home and exchange stories. When he did go out, it was to quietly attend lectures on black representation at the University of California- Berkeley or to slip over to Modesto to visit a youth camp for children with heart defects.
Early last s u mmer, Kaepernick was drawn to a different story: those involving police and African-Americans. His social media feeds, previously used for motivational quotes or to chirp at teammates, became a pulpit. He shared videos and unvarnished reactions, a dramatic break from the normally bland public commentary of NFL quarterbacks.
“This is what lynchings look like in 2016!” he wrote on an Instagram post about the death of Alton Sterling, who died in Baton Rouge, after two police officers shot him.
“We are under attack! It’s clear as day!” Kaepernick wrote a day later, alongside a video showing the immedi- ate aftermath of Philando Castile’s shooting by a Minnesota police officer.
“Apparently this is what our system calls justice,” he wrote a few weeks later, after charges were dropped against three Baltimore police officers following the death of Freddie Gray.
Kaepernick was absorbing again; by last September, he had taken on all he could. Now there was something else he just had to do.
That was a year ago, and in the time since, “Kaepernicking” has come to look starkly different: high school and college athletes have knelt during the national anthem, and so have WNBA players, a soccer star and a gold-medal swimmer.
NBA players locked arms before games, NFL players raised fists, and representatives on the grassroots level of American sports followed the lead of the complicated man in the 49ers uniform: high school cheerleaders in Nebraska, a college marching band in North Carolina, a volleyball team in Massachusetts.
After the quarterback opted out of his 49ers contract in March, Donald Trump sugg est edKae per nick wouldn’t join a new team because franchises were afraid of “getting a nasty tweet” from the president. It is, in the image- conscious NFL, more straightforward than that.
“No one wants then onsense or the B. S. It’s not collusion, it’s common sense ,” the NFL owner said, going on to credit Kaepernick on one front. “The thing that he’s done probably more effectively than any team community relations staff or owner or coach could do for other players is ( point out) that they do have the ability to affect the national dialogue.”
Critics wonder what it is Kaepernick hopes will come out of this, and when it comes to his endgame, he has so far allowed others to speak for him.
Symone Sanders, the former Bernie Sanders spokeswoman, said it’s for the NFL to institute an advocacy policy and form a commission on race relations. Bender, Kaepernick’s former college teammate, said his friend hopes to bring continued awareness and further advance the conversation on race. Kevin Livingston, an activist who staged a smaller rally for Kaepernick in May, said there is no finish line; that “Colin won already” by forcing people to rethink the national anthem.
A LOT OF WHITE PEOPLE ARE RACIST TOWARD (KAEPERNICK), BUT A LOT OF BLACK PEOPLE ARE RACIST TOWARD HIM, TOO.