Category Archives: colin kaepernick

Sports? Now?

Let’s say spectator sports were to return tomorrow. A dominant theme in the nation’s sports pages, ever since the coronavirus shut down the world of fun and games almost three months ago, has been how badly we miss and need sports. To take our minds off our disrupted lives. To resume business as usual. To get back to “normal.”

But tomorrow, who would be comfortable with the health risks? The virus is still out there. More to the point, given the more urgent crisis—a white Minnesota policeman’s video-captured murder of a black man named George Floyd and the national rage it has triggered—who would be okay with the priorities? Who would buy into oft-cited function of sports “healing” during times of fear and uncertainty?

This is not like moving on from a hurricane. Or even 9/11. After that 2001 trauma, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam, writing for ESPN’s web site, asked if sports in fact provided “badly needed relief from the darker concerns and burdens of our lives, as so many people (most of them connected to the world of sports, and therefore with no small amount of vested interest) keep saying?”

His answer was, “I have my doubts. Strong ones, as a matter of fact.”

In a piece for New York Magazine last week, Will Leitch acknowledged that, having sheltered in place since mid-March, “the populace seemed starved, downright lustful for live sports. But now? Would you find it appropriate to sit down and watch a baseball game? Or would you find it obscene?”

Especially given the irony of how Floyd’s death has revived the sports establishment’s traditional distancing from civil rights issues. And specifically, the juxtaposition of that cop violently kneeling on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes while—four years ago—San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt, peacefully, during the National Anthem to call attention to police mistreatment of blacks.

“Two knees,” Sally Jenkins wrote in the Washington Post. “One protesting in the grass, one pressing on the back of a man’s neck. Choose. You have to choose which knee you will defend. There are no half choices….only the knee of protest or the knee on the neck.”

The NFL chose the latter four years ago. Kaepernick was blackballed by the NFL, while a Greek chorus of many fans and media joined Donald Trump in branding Kaepernick anti-American. Only now has league commissioner Roger Goodell reversed field, confessing that “we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest.” He never mentioned—nor apologized to—Kaepernick.

In an interview on NPR, ESPN’s Howard Bryant noted how professional sports “have backed themselves into a corner. Especially post-9/11, they have embedded police into their business model. You have Armed Forces Appreciation Days. You have police as part of the entertainment of the game, in terms of hometown heroes and all of this. And when you have moments like this, these moments of unrest, these moments of police brutality or impropriety, you see the box these teams are put in.”

Sports Illustrated’s Michael Rosenberg argued that “mainstream white America is going to reconsider Kaepernick at some point—the way it reconsidered Muhammad Ali years after he refused to go to Vietnam, the way it reconsidered Jackie Robinson and Jack Johnson. Progress comes in fits and starts, and this country tends to punish those who urge it to move faster. The reconsideration of Kaepernick has begun.”

Maybe. Herman Edwards, the former NFL player and coach who now coaches at Arizona State, recently suggested that the nation needs to initiate a conversation not unlike how his gridiron lads strategize tactics that serve everyone going forward. “A huddle,” he said.

Better than just games. Better than business as usual.

Smith-Carlos and Kaepernick: Compare and contrast.

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Long before Colin Kaepernick, there was the Tommie Smith-John Carlos incident. Complete with the same horrified amazement—or amazed horror—over the appropriateness of the gesture. The same rotten-tomato treatment of the medium that mostly blotted out the message.

“We didn’t carry guns,” Smith reminded during a rare reunion with Carlos in 2004, 36 years after the fact. “We didn’t beat anybody up. It was a prayer of solidarity, a cry of freedom. But it was an agonizing hurt for America, because everybody saw it. The whole world saw it.”

What Smith and Carlos did in 1968 was use the stage of the Mexico City Olympics—specifically, the victory podium during the playing of the “Star Spangled Banner” after Smith won the 200-meter gold medal and Carlos the bronze—as a call for social awareness and plea for the disenfranchised. Head down, each silently raised a black-gloved fist.

“It was basically an act of love,” Carlos said at the same low-key 2004 appearance with Smith during the U.S. Olympic track and field trials in Sacramento. “Tough love, but love.” He compared it to disciplining a child to keep him from “putting his hand in a socket. We spanked America on the fanny and said, ‘Don’t put your hand in that socket.’”

In ’68, some American cities literally were in flames over civil rights unrest, the Vietnam war was raging months after both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. At San Jose State University, where Smith and Carlos were among the stars on the so-called “Speed City” team, sociology professor Harry Edwards had attempted (but failed) to organize a black boycott of the Mexico City Games.

At the last minute, after setting a world record in the 200, Smith decided to raise a his gloved right hand during the playing of the anthem. He gave his left-hand glove to Carlos with an invitation to follow his lead.

As with this year’s Kaepernick protest, in which the San Francisco 49ers quarterback has been joined by other athletes kneeling during the pre-game anthem to focus attention on police treatment of minorities, the immediate reaction to Smith and Carlos was one of wide condemnation for shattering protocol, for showing disrespect.

The veteran sportscaster Brent Musburger, then a Chicago newspaper columnist who represented the clubby establishment thinking, railed that Smith and Carlos were “black-skinned storm troopers.” International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage, an American, and U.S. Olympic Committee officials were outraged, ordering Smith and Carlos out of the athletes’ village and suspending them from further competition.

Hate mail and death threats followed. Smith never ran another competitive race, and it was decades before more thoughtful and nuanced perceptions of the Smith-Carlos action began to take hold.

In his 1993 memoire “Days of Grace,” tennis champion and activist Arthur Ashe wrote that Smith and Carlos had turned the Mexico City victory stand “into a sacrificial altar as they surrendered their victory to the greater good of downtrodden black people.”

In 1999, HBO aired a documentary, “Fists of Freedom,” in which Smith recounted how he was “scared. I was scared. My father said to me when I got home, ‘Boy’—he’s the only one allowed to call me ‘boy’—‘I don’t know what all this hooprah’—as he called it—‘comes from. But you’re my son, and it must be good because I raised you to do the right thing.’”

In 2005, a 23-foot sculpture of that Smith-Carlos Olympic moment was erected at the heart of the San Jose State campus. (The statue left empty the place on the victory podium that had been occupied by white Australian Peter Norman—who subtly joined the two Americans’ protest by wearing the same Olympic Project for Human Rights button as Smith and Carlos—so that visitors can pose with a raised fist on the silver-medal step.)

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In August, Smith, now 72, and Carlos, 71, were among the old “Speed City” athletes invited to the school’s announcement that it was reviving the storied track and field program they had brought to worldwide prominence. (San Jose State had discontinued track in 1988 for what it said was financial reasons, though it kept vastly more expensive football.)

Three weeks ago, when members of this summer’s U.S. Olympic and Paralympic teams were honored at the White House, Smith and Carlos were invited to serve as the teams’ “ambassadors”—finally and officially welcomed back into the USOC family after 48 years as outcasts. “Their powerful silent protest in the 1968 Games was controversial,” President Obama said, “but it woke folks up and created greater opportunity for those that followed.”

That same week, the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African-American History & Culture opened just yards from the White House—with a bronze statue of the Smith-Carlos victory-stand demonstration at its entry to the sports gallery.

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It was at a New York screening of the 2004 HBO documentary, days before the film aired, that Smith offered me an ironic update on the fallout from their 1968 public display. He said his son, 11 years old at the time, had just seen a promo of “Fists of Freedom” and “called me at work. He called on my beeper, actually. I called him back and he said, ‘Dad! You’re on TV!’ He said, “You’re famous!’”

Famous. A little like Colin Kaepernick is famous—for choosing a protest setting that even historically progressive Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has called “dumb,” “disrespectful,” and “ridiculous;” a circumstance that so many people can’t comprehend.

That day at the HBO screening, Smith said, “I’m still trying to explain it. I’ll be trying to explain it till the day I die.”

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The question of protests

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With any big news story, there really are more questions than answers. Has Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand during the national anthem before NFL games enlightened the public about racial inequities in America? Or has it merely empowered the scribes and Pharisees—talking heads and comportment police—to lecture over what constitutes an appropriate protest?

Has Kaepernick sparked a debate about police treatment of minorities, which is his stated intention? Or has he fueled an argument about whether he, as a $19-million-a-year backup quarterback, is in any position to speak for the oppressed?

By not participating in what his critics consider an act of patriotism, is he disrespecting American military troops and those who serve the country? Or he is reinforcing what the anthem and flag stand for—the freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment?

Should we be talking about this?

For the animated adult cartoon “South Park,” to which nothing is off limits, assumptions of uncompromising certainties in the Kaepernick case are skewered by its satiric rewriting of the Star-Spangled Banner’s lyrics:

    Colin Kaepernick is great.

    Cops are pigs, cops are pigs.

    Wait, someone just took my stuff, I need to call the cops.

    Oh, no, I just said cops are pigs.

    Who’s gonna help me get my stuff?

    Why did I listen to Colin Kaepernick? He’s not even any good.

    Oh, I just got all my stuff back.

    Cops are pigs again, cops are pigs.

    Colin Kaepernick is a good backup….

As a career sports journalist, I was struck by the thoughtful observations of SUNY-Oswego communications professor Brian Moritz, a former sportswriter, who mulled whether reports subsequent to Kaepernick’s first protest on Aug. 26 somehow are hijacking his original intent.

“If two of the most primary news values are conflict (aka disagreements) and deviance (something outside the norm),” Moritz wrote on his sportsmediaguy.com Web site, “then it’s natural for reporters to focus on people who disagree loudly with Kaepernick. Ambivalence is not a great news value, especially not if one or more players voice strong disapproval of Kaepernick’s actions. Those disapproving voices get amplified in the follow-up stories (because they fit the established news values), and I wonder how much that amplification inadvertently isolates Kaepernick and his position.

“The point,” Mortiz added, “is not whether Kaepernick is right or wrong. We’re grownups. We’re allowed to disagree. The point is whether the way we…cover a story effects public perception of the issues involved.”

Does it stray from Kaepernick’s message to know that a principal in Florida told students they would be ejected from sports events if they didn’t stand for the national anthem? Or that a Massachusetts high school football player was threatened with suspension if he mimicked Kaepernick? That presidential candidate Donald Trump invited Kaepernick to leave the country and Iowa congressman Steve King compared a player’s kneeling during the anthem akin to “activism that is sympathetic to ISIS”?

According to a report in the U.K.-based Telegraph, an Alabama preacher informed a high school football crowd, “If you don’t want to stand for the national anthem, you can line up over there by the fence and let our military personnel take a few shots at you.”

Perhaps it further inflames Kaepernick’s detractors that Wesley Morris, in a New York Times Magazine essay, pointed to the football establishment’s long history of seeking “to conflate itself with the military, making it easy to confuse players with troops and political protest with treason.” Morris argued that “modern patriotism has become Kabuki citizenship” through rituals that have turned national loyalty into “a matter of optics—of theater.”

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A few other pros have joined Kaepernick’s no-standing stance during pre-game anthems. As the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times noted, the Supreme Court in 1943 established that citizens cannot be forced to pledge allegiance to the American flag or engage in other patriotic demonstrations, and a 1969 ruling reinforced the constitutional right to express political opinions as long as they don’t impose on “the rights of others.”

In the end, it does not appear that Kaepernick has endangered anyone, with the possible exception of himself. He “has placed his livelihood in peril in the service of his conscience,” contended Penn State professor Abraham Iqbal Khan in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette opinion piece, calling that “a risk that merits our attention.”

Meanwhile, it surely does no good that Fox Sports commentator Jason Whitlock—like Kaepernick, an African-American—has questioned not only Kaepernick’s integrity and football ability, but also his blackness?

“This kid was about Instagram models, tattoos, his abs and building up the Colin Kaepernick brand—until the very moment he loses his starting quarterback job,” Whitlock said, “and now he’s out here and he’s ‘Martin Luther Cornrow.’ And he’s got cornrows, he’s Allen Iverson, he’s Angela Davis. I don’t buy it.”

Jason Whitlock, by the way, was working as a scribe for the Kansas City Star in 2009 when he similarly lit into Serena Williams—at the time a champion of 11 Grand Slam tennis tournaments—for being overweight and deficient of “guts….an underachiever [who] lacks the courage to fulfill her destiny.”

To that, Williams, who since has won 11 more Slam events, had a question: “Who is Jason Whitlock?”