For Nike, Kaepernick is a cause worth selling
Colin Kaepernick is not quite Che Guevara, though like Che Guevara Kaepernick’s NFL career is dead and both things can be memorialized on a T-shirt.
Now Nike has announced that Kaepernick, the quarterback who has been effectively blackballed from the National Football League, would be the face of the 30th anniversary of the company’s Just Do It campaign.
They released a black and white ad of Kaepernick’s face with text that read, “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” It’s a good ad.
This, of course, is the equivalent of tossing a lit match into the gasoline-andgrease-soaked sneakers that are America’s endless, tribal culture wars.
Kaepernick is out of the NFL because in 2016 and 2017 he peacefully protested institutional racism in America toward black people and people of colour by kneeling during the national anthem.
This made some people mad, and the great American conservative attack machine’s engines are already moaning, ginning up cardboard patriotism and wilful misinformation.
The president of the United States, offered only milquetoast criticism of the move, because he said the Nike store in Manhattan is one of his tenants. They’ve apparently already moved out, but maybe nobody told him. Normal country.
Whatever Nike’s reasons, it is a decision to the good. America has become a nation with no middle ground, and barely a centre at all: It is a nation of tug-of-wars and fiery pits, and everybody has to pick a side.
So Nike, a key league sponsor, has put its massive institutional weight behind football’s foremost political exile. There will apparently be shoes, T-shirts, and if it sells, maybe more. He could be a major Nike athlete. That’s a big deal.
It should be remembered that Nike is not your friend, and not your leader. It is trying to protect its flank from the lifestyle-cool-triangulation of rival Adidas, whose market share in North America is vastly outpacing Nike’s, even though Nike has triple the sales.
Colin Kaepernick has been judged by Nike’s sophisticated market research machine to be worth more to them in protest-appreciating young people than the angry conservative dudes who take time out from grilling some burgers to embarrass themselves by burning their Nikes on the lawn.
Young people are more liberal, older ones more conservative. The NFL is scared of Kaepernick, and protest. Nike has decided it’s worth embracing.
Nike has always balanced whether an athlete was worth the cost, and for all the times it has come down on the slightly controversial side of social progress — the Williams sisters, or for a brief moment a young Tiger Woods — it has demonstrated market-driven amorality, too.
Nike kept Kobe Bryant on after Eagle, Colo., and stuck with Ben Roethlisberger after his sexual assault accusations in 2008, and again in 2010.
After dropping former Penn State coach Joe Paterno following the Jerry Sandusky scandal, Nike went back to Paterno when the Paterno family fought back.
Consider that decision in the wake of the Larry Nassar scandal. Imagine Nike trying to make an ad defending it. Actually, Nike is still a Michigan State sponsor, and has not taken sides in the efforts of former gymnasts to hold the university to account for its role in the Nassar child abuse scandal. Nobody has made an ad about that yet.
So no, this isn’t Nike trying to change the world because it’s the right thing to do. To paraphrase a possibly apocryphal but accurate Michael Jordan quote, Democrats buy shoes, too.
But it happens to be the right thing to do in an era when you either choose a side or let the wrong side win.
As San Francisco 49ers cornerback Richard Sherman puts it, “I think at the end of the day, (the anger toward Kaepernick) comes down to people being wilfully ignorant at times, and I can appreciate Nike standing by their athletes because they understand the bottom line and what he’s fighting for and what he’s standing for and what he’s protesting for.”
And as Philadelphia Eagles lineman Chris Long told reporters, “You see a major corporation like Nike get behind him, it reinforces that you can still stand up for what you believe in, and you can still be a mainstream face that people look at, and you can be marketable.”
Whatever their reasons, Nike chose a side when choosing a side is more flammable than ever.
Colin Kaepernick is not Che Guevara, and Nike is not America’s saviour. But the biggest shoe company in America decided he’s worth putting on a T-shirt. Maybe they can sell a revolution.