Colin Kaepernick’s unfinished business

Colin Kaepernick still puts in a workout at 4:30 a.m. most days. His football life may be long over, but his life’s work is not. Ten years after taking a knee to stand against racism and police brutality at great cost to his career and finances, the former star quarterback is stepping back into the spotlight. His memoir, “The Perilous Fight,” comes out on Sept. 15. And in interviews with NBC News, his first time speaking in depth about his protest’s fallout in years, Kaepernick reveals the story behind how he came to take a knee in 2016, an act that made him both a hero and a pariah, and one of the most divisive figures in the country. Kaepernick, 38, is now also a father of a 4-year-old girl. That, he says, helped him understand he has unfinished business in his life and cause. Being a dad “increases the responsibility and urgency of the work we’re doing,” he says. He doesn’t want his daughter — or anyone else — to think he stopped fighting or that the fight was not worth it. “I don’t want my community to watch me and have the takeaway be that if you fight for Black folks, it’s over for you,” he writes in his book. Much has shifted in American politics, culture, sports and policing since 2016. And much work still needs to be done, Kaepernick says, which is why he chose now to recount the decade-long odyssey that began with a quiet protest during the national anthem. Though the years have provided perspective, Kaepernick says they haven’t dulled his displeasure with the NFL. The quarterback who once led the San Francisco 49ers on a Disney movie-esque run to the Super Bowl in 2012 says he hasn’t watched an NFL game since he was exiled from the league. “I’m not gonna support an organization that one, is actively blackballing me, but two, has targeted my brothers who have been protesting as part of this as well,” Kaepernick says. “I watch college football.” (NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has said on multiple occasions he doesn’t believe Kaepernick was blackballed.) On Sept. 1, 2016, Kaepernick and his San Francisco 49ers teammate Eric Reid kneeled during the national anthem before a preseason game. It was not the first time Kaepernick didn’t stand. His protest actually began a month earlier, on Aug. 14, when he sat on the bench during “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The idea had simmered in the months prior to the season when, he writes in his memoir, he was recuperating from surgeries. He might not have taken a knee if he hadn’t injured it first. The rehab gave him more free time than he ever had in his life. And in the midst of news of police violence, Kaepernick immersed himself in literature on Black liberation, reading books such as “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and “Black Skin, White Masks” by Frantz Fanon. Kaepernick says he hadn’t planned the initial protest in mid-August until he heard the opening of the anthem and felt he couldn’t bring himself to stand. No one seemed to notice him sitting at first. It wasn’t until after the 49ers’ third preseason game that Kaepernick was finally asked why he sat out the anthem. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color,” Kaepernick told NFL Network’s Steve Wyche. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” Kaepernick was unprepared for the response, he writes in the book. After the game, he called his partner, Nessa, and mentioned the reporter’s question. “Hmm. Well, what did you tell him?” she asked. “On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst, how hard did you go?” “I don’t know. Maybe a 4,” Kaepernick replied. The backlash was immediate. Fans burned his jerseys. Current and former players said he disrespected the flag. Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate, said Kaepernick “should find a country that works better for him.” “This is not a four, man,” Kaepernick recalls Nessa telling him when the news blew up. Even though the story of the protest has been told countless times since 2016, Kaepernick set the record straight on one key detail: who came up with the idea to kneel in the first place. Before the Sept. 1 game, Kaepernick was approached by Reid, who wanted to support the protest. It was Reid who suggested the idea to kneel, Kaepernick says. Not Army veteran Nate Boyer, as was widely reported at the time and since. Boyer, a Green Beret and former Seattle Seahawk, had penned an open letter to Kaepernick in the Army Times, writing: “Even though my initial reaction to your protest was one of anger, I’m trying to listen to what you’re saying and why you’re doing it.” On the day of the game, Boyer met with Kaepernick and Reid and relayed stories about how veterans responded to his open letter. The conversation, Boyer says, then shifted to how the protest could be respectful of the military. “I think it was Colin specifically that asked it. He said, ‘Well, do you think there’s a way that we could protest that’s not going to offend people in the military?’” Boyer recalls. “And I said, ‘No. No matter what, some people will be offended.’” Boyer then told Kaepernick he believed sitting on the bench “wasn’t the most inspiring” and that the protest could be more effective if he was next to his teammates, perhaps bowing his head while standing. “He said no immediately, and I respect that,” Boyer says, and the conversation then logically turned to taking a knee. He doesn’t dispute that the two players may have come to that conclusion before meeting him. “I remember them nodding their heads and looking at each other,” Boyer says. “Maybe Eric did suggest that, and that’s kind of what that look was.” After the Sept. 1 game, Reid told reporters “[Boyer] agreed with” the idea for them to kneel. Kaepernick says the notion it was Boyer’s idea appealed to the media because the backing of a white military veteran made the pr...