College lessons

Kaepernick arrived in Reno — Nevada evidently liked a little audacity from its quarterbacks — and almost immediately went searching for himself.

Football locker 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 but a curiosity about an urban world he had been born into but had never fully explored. As he settled in, he couldn’t help his mind wandering. “Just thinking about: Where would I be now if these things didn’t happen the way they did?” he would tell the Gazette-Journal in 2010.

He joined a traditionally African-American fraternity and found himself drawn to the Wolf coaches what they needed.

Once, a former Pitman coach said, he casually mentioned to Kaepernick about an underprivileged school he’d visited in Southern California; before long Kaepernick had arranged for a truck to be loaded with Nike gear and offloaded 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,” during the 2012 NFL season, 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 restaurant or 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 CaliforniaBerkeley or to slip over to Modesto to visit a youth camp for children with heart defects, the silent afflictions Kaepernick himself