Colin Kaepernick, the free-agent quarterback, was born in November of 1987 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His birth mother, single, 19, and poor, put him up for adoption, and he took the name of his adoptive parents, Rick and Teresa Kaepernick, who had lost two infant sons to heart defects--two other Kaepernick children survive. When Colin was 4, the family moved from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin to California's central valley, where their youngest eventually excelled in both school and athletics at John H. Pitman High in the town of Turlock. Colin played football, basketball, and baseball, had a 4.0 grade point average, was nominated for all-state consideration in all three sports, and was a first-team all-district, all-conference, and all-academic selection. In his senior year, Pitman's basketball team was eliminated from their district tournament by rival Oak Ridge despite 34 points from Kaepernick; Ryan Anderson, currently of the Houston Rockets in the NBA, scored 50 points in the game for Oak Ridge. Kaepernick received the most attention for his baseball pitching, but he was determined to play college football despite attracting little interest from D-1 FBS programs--a likely factor was his physical specs, 6-4 and only 170 pounds as a high school senior. He accepted a football scholarship from the University of Nevada after an assistant coach saw him play in a high school basketball game and was blown away by his athleticism. This turned out well for Nevada: Kaepernick is the only D-1 quarterback to have passed for more than 10,000 yards and rushed for more than 4,000 yards during his collegiate career. The San Francisco 49ers chose him in the second round of the 2011 NFL draft, and from then till now the headlines of his biography are comparatively well known. Before becoming a lightning rod for criticism on account of impiety during the national anthem, his biggest brush with trouble was probably when, in 2014, he incurred a $10,000 fine from the NFL for wearing Beats headphones to a post-game press conference--Bose being at the time the official headphone of the NFL. He's contributed money by the barrelful to charity.
I'm not Kaepernick's official biographer but, if Wikipedia can be trusted, the above is all true.
That he has become a persona non grata is somewhat perplexing to me. I had thought that a bedrock American principle is summarized in the saying, I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend onto death your right to say it. Obviously I was wrong. That people are, or purport to be, apoplectic over such a mild protest seems to me to qualify them for what I guess they call snowflakery. Much of what is said about Kaepernick is wildly over-the-top. The bit about disrespecting dead servicemen is a gambit that, if valid, would in effect rescind the First Amendment: people have died in battle, therefore you must be silent. Former NFL star Jim Brown says Kaepernick desecrates the flag. I don't know what he means by "desecrate," but the Supreme Court, in an opinion joined by Justice Scalia, has held that burning the flag, which seems well beyond anything Kaepernick has done, is constitutionally protected speech. There can't be any question about him being within his rights as an American citizen.
Nevertheless, it's apparent that he's been blackballed by the NFL. The argument that football considerations account for no team picking him up is laughable. He'll turn 30 in November and, in the most recently completed season, had a quarterback rating of 91 as an occasional starter for a terrible team. In a game against the Dolphins last November, he passed for 296 yards and three touchdowns while rushing for 113 yards: the 49ers lost anyway. Yet no one wants him even as a back-up. The snowflakes say there are so many of them that he's bad for business, but Kaepernick could help a team win. And isn't winning good for business? Isn't that why there's a place on rosters for, say, serial abusers of wives/fiancees/girlfriends/escorts?
Can you really throw someone out of the league for expressing an opinion? Moreover, for what it's worth, Kaepernick's protests arise from opinions on police shootings and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement that are surely shared by a significant percentage of the league's fans. Though he isn't on a team, Kaepernick's jersey is still a top-20 seller. But, without recourse to any economic aspect of his case, blackballing him is simply un-American.
I say something similar about college protestors who shout down wing-nuts who come to campus--they should instead just stay home and study, or take a date to the movies. It's a cliché, because it's true, that the remedy for stupidity is more speech, more expression, not less. Jon Stewart has shown pretty convincingly that if you just let them talk, and then play the tape, the sane part of the population immediately comprehends that they are hilariously full of shit. Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter have recently proven the general principle with their incisive commentary on the hurricane in Florida.
I don't particularly carry the torch for Kaepernick. His body is festooned with tattoos of bible verses, which, when asked about, he unfailingly says things you'd think should be too stupid for a 4.0 student to believe. It's pretty much the same shtick that causes baseball players to blow a kiss heavenward while crossing the plate after hitting a homer. I guess the poor pitcher is just a tool used by God to give glory to the hitter. You'd think He might check out of the ball game long enough to direct hurricanes away from population centers, but no, He's a real fan.
Comments