RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Nothing about Colin Kaepernick, the football player, changed on that warm Southern California night a decade ago.
Not his speed. Not his arm strength. Not the improvisational skills that made him one of the NFL’s most electrifying, if at times erratic, quarterbacks.
And to be honest, nothing changed about Colin Kaepernick, the 28-year-old man, that night either.
If anything, the moment the San Francisco 49ers star decided to take a knee during the national anthem before a preseason game on Sept. 1, 2016, to bring attention to a series of social issues he cares deeply about — from racial injustice to minority oppression to police brutality — only revealed to the world at large who Kaepernick always believed himself to be.
“It wasn’t a sudden act,” he wrote in a statement this spring announcing his memoir, ”The Perilous Fight,” a title borrowed from a passage of the very song to which his name will forever be linked.
No, it wasn’t.
That night wasn’t even the first time the player who always seemed to have one eye on the field and the other on the world at large chose to do something other than stand during the anthem. In the two previous 49er exhibitions that August, he sat on the bench, largely unnoticed, as the anthem played.
Only after connecting with former NFL player and retired Green Beret Nate Boyer in a hotel lobby did Kaepernick move from the bench to a knee, something Boyer suggested would be more respectful to those in the military.
He didn’t announce he was going to do it. He didn’t share it on social media. He didn’t promote it in any way. He just did it, quietly placing his right knee on the ground, his left arm across his left knee and staring silently ahead as Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Steven Powell sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
When Kaepernick huddled with noted sociologist and then-49ers advisor Harry Edwards in the aftermath, they both knew Kaepernick’s decision carried considerable risk.
While Kaepernick, who is biracial, was hardly the first athlete of color to parlay the playing of the anthem into an attempt to draw attention to social inequity — from U.S. track athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Summer Olympics to college basketball player Ariyana Smith at Knox College, who in late 2014 stood under the basket with her hands up during the anthem, then laid on the court for over four minutes in protest over the shooting death of Black teenager Michael Brown in Missouri — Edwards understood the spotlight the NFL provides and Kaepernick’s status within the game had the potential to make it a divisive cultural flashpoint.
“I said, ‘You know, this is going to become a major issue,’” Edwards told The Associated Press. “You are a Black male and seen as a greater threat because of the centrality of male activities and male sports. And so there’s no way that there’s not going to be a price to pay for this.”
The price ended up being Kaepernick’s football career.
The conversation Kaepernick intended to start was instead hijacked. The method of Kaepernick’s protest became the focus, with critics calling it offensive, particularly to those in the armed forces.
Then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump lashed out and later, as president, labeled any player who knelt a “son of a bitch”. Fans burned Kaepernick’s jersey in anger. The boos that cascaded in his direction every Sunday were hardly limited to 49er road games, though the franchise trudging through a miserable 2-14 season didn’t help.
While supporters pointed out that Kaepernick’s right to kneel is one of the freedoms protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution, the very thing those in uniform are commanded to defend, it didn’t seem to matter.
No matter how hard Kaepernick kept trying to steer the talk toward racial injustice, it swerved in seemingly every other direction instead.
Four months after kneeling for the first time, Kaepernick threw his 1,692nd and final pass in the NFL, a 9-yard touchdown pass to tight end Garrett Celek late in the fourth quarter against Seattle, a play that highlighted some of what made Kaepernick so tantalizing as a player. He dropped back, glanced to his left, then stepped up in the pocket and fired a dart over the middle to Celek in the end zone.
The score brought the 49ers to within three. San Francisco never got the ball again. The Seahawks ran out the clock, and Kaepernick’s No. 7 jersey disappeared down the tunnel toward the locker room one last time.
The 49ers hit reboot during the offseason, firing head coach Chip Kelly and replacing him with Kyle Shanahan. Kaepernick met with Shanahan and new general manager John Lynch, then opted to void the remaining year on his contract and become a free agent.
The player whose rise in 2012 sparked San Francisco to an NFC title, who once led former NFL quarterback-turned-analyst Ron Jaworski to wonder aloud if Kaepernick could become one of the best ever at the position, never pulled on a uniform again.
Kaepernick and former teammate Eric Reid — who knelt alongside him in 2016 — filed a lawsuit against the NFL claiming owners colluded to blacklist them out of the game. A settlement was reached in 2019, and while Kaepernick kept one toe in the game — as late as 2022, he worked out for the Las Vegas Raiders — both he and the league seem to have moved on.
An absence that still leaves some wondering ‘why’?
Nearing 10 years after the 72nd and final touchdown pass of his career, the circumstances remain hard for some to square. How is it that 32 teams saw a player in his prime, a player who guided a team to the Super Bowl, and who was only a couple of years removed from leading his team on a pair of deep playoff runs, and decided “nah, we’re good”?
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