Kaepernick’s close call leaves impact
MIAMI — One play. Five yards. A flag that wasn’t thrown.
Seven years ago at the Super Bowl, history was made when a 49ers receiver, unable to break free from the prying hands of a harassing cornerback, could not grab a pass on fourthand-goal that would have given San Francisco the go-ahead score late in the game against the Baltimore Ravens.
The Niners lost that game 34-31 and were relegated to the forgettable list of very good NFL teams who came in second place. For the man who threw that pass, Colin Kaepernick, things have never been the same.
The same could be said about the NFL.
The 49ers made it back to the Super Bowl this year, but Kaepernick had nothing to do with this trip. His name has barely been mentioned. In most instances, this would simply be another example of the relentless churn of players through a league that chews them up and spits them out. But at 32, Kaepernick could, conceivably, be in his prime. Instead, he has been out of the league for three years.
And yet, if there’s a single player who brought this league to a point of reckoning — who exposed it for what it is, what it is not, and what it could still be when it comes to shaping conversations about the American experience that cascade well beyond the football field — it is that now-unemployed quarterback out of Nevada who came 5 yards from winning the Super Bowl in 2013.
“By losing that job, he gained a legacy, a career,“said Marcus Hunter, chairman of the department of African-American Studies at UCLA. “Now, he has more than a job. He’s an activistminded thought leader about the state of race in America. A lot of young people, including a lot who I teach, often find themselves sitting there waiting to see what he is going to say.”
Instead of being forever known as a Super Bowl champion, Kaepernick will go down as the quarterback who kneeled — first during the national anthem before a preseason game — to spark one of the biggest controversies in the NFL’s 100-year history and, in turn, to bring what looks like a premature end to his own career.
He explained his low-key decision not to stand in 2016 as a way of underscoring his disdain for social injustice in America, a country where blacks are targeted and arrested by police at alarmingly higher rates than are whites.
The decision drew the support of fellow players, dozens of whom initially joined him in his show of protest.
It drew the ire of a certain cross-section of the country, stoked in part by President Donald Trump, who infamously wondered out loud at a political rally about how nice it would be for an NFL owner to point at a kneeling player and say “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now.” Not long after, Vice President Mike Pence walked out of a game involving the 49ers, several of whom supported Kaepernick’s cause and kneeled during the anthem before a game against the Indianapolis Colts.
It forced the NFL into a series of uncomfortable decisions, first in an attempt to simply tamp down the discord about kneeling, then later to try to get on board with Kaepernick’s cause, albeit with an unspoken hope that the protests come to a halt.
“He clearly drew attention to a societal problem which needs to be addressed and that we haven’t addressed,” said Alan Page, the Hall of Fame defensive lineman who went on to a career as a Minnesota Supreme Court justice. “There’s value in that. The problem is, we get sidetracked, I think, in focusing on things that aren’t really relevant to the problem. We get sidetracked on flags and all that.”
Also sidetracked: Kaepernick’s career.
Though it’s hard to imagine that not one of 32 teams could find a place for a quarterback with potential to disrupt defenses with both his arm and his legs, a quarterback who, to this day, has the sixth-best TD-to-interception ratio in NFL history, a quarterback not far removed from bringing a team within five yards of winning the Super Bowl, there is no spot for Kaepernick.
He filed a grievance against the league, claiming the teams colluded to keep him out, and the parties eventually reached an undisclosed settlement.