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.
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”?
The NFL is, in just about every way, a meritocracy. Pedigree doesn’t matter, only production. The league’s history is filled with players granted countless second (and in some cases, third or fourth) chances despite various misdeeds, some of whom returned to the field after spending time in prison.
Over the last month, the Seattle Seahawks sprinted to land cornerback Terrion Arnold even as he faces eight felony charges stemming from an incident in Florida. Arnold, who has denied the allegations, agreed to a one-year deal on Saturday and was immediately placed on the commissioner’s exempt list by the NFL while it conducts its own investigation.
Kaepernick, by contrast, remains unsigned to this day even as countless quarterbacks with lesser resumes have drifted in and out of the league.
His exile doesn’t quite make sense to longtime Pittsburgh Steelers defensive lineman Cam Heyward. Heyward described Kaepernick as “hell of a talent” who created “headaches” for opponents on the field and who once passed for 302 yards, ran for 62 more, and accounted for a pair of touchdowns in the Super Bowl, a game Heyward is still waiting to play in as he enters his 16th season.
Heyward, a seven-time Pro Bowler and the league’s 2023 recipient of the Walter Payton Man of the Year award for his charity work and contributions to the community off the field, also remembers a player who stuck to his convictions in the face of withering pressure.
The way Heyward figures it, isn’t that kind of the point? While stressing he didn’t have all the specifics on why Kaepernick never played again, Heyward said the quiet part out loud when asked if he felt Kaepernick’s stand was the driving force behind why he didn’t play beyond 2016.
“I don’t think any player deserves that,” Heyward told the AP. “I think we all strive to be football players, but then we also strive to give back. And you never would think it would lead to that. It feels like he paid the price with his career. I just don’t think that’s right.”
It’s telling of how fraught Kaepernick’s decision remains 10 years later that numerous people who either played or coached alongside Kaepernick in 2016 declined to speak to the AP about their experiences of that season and its fallout.
“I think that this reluctance to even talk about it now is indicative of to what degree did the NFL substantively address it,” said Frederick Gooding Jr., a professor of African-American studies at TCU and the author of a book examining the intersection of race, media and sports. “If anything, people should be more open to talk about this, warts and all.”
It hasn’t happened on the scale Kaepernick envisioned, and Gooding added that he believes one reason Kaepernick never took another snap was the way he “forced people to get uncomfortable.”
It wasn’t until 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minnesota, that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell acknowledged the league misstepped by not listening to players like Kaepernick who were fighting for social equality. By then, Kaepernick was already three-plus years removed from the sport.
“Now that the game has been decided, now that his career is effectively over, now from a power and control standpoint, the NFL still is able to acknowledge that maybe they should have listened better, but they’re not losing anything,” Gooding said. “Now the stakes are lower for them to admit in retrospect.”
While demonstrating during the anthem spread across the league in the immediate aftermath – with as many as 200 players taking a knee at times during the 2017 season – the temperature, at least inside NFL stadiums, has been turned down even as it remains ratcheted up in so many other areas of society.
Edwards, whose roots in promoting social justice date back to his time counseling Smith and Carlos to raise their gloved fists in a Black power salute while on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics, once publicly lobbied for Kaepernick to return to the game.
Now, he sees the work Kaepernick and his wife, Nessa, have done through the years – from the “Know Your Rights” camps they host to promote “education, self-empowerment, mass-mobilization” for people of color to the independent autopsies their foundation pays for (most recently following the death of Black teenager Nolan Wells in Mississippi) – and believes the game would have just gotten in the way.
“Nothing he would ever accomplish in football, even if there was a team that would bring him on board, would match his importance as a sports political figure in the first two decades of the 20th century,” Edwards said. “And I think that that’s critically important that that example be out there. There will be others who will come along. The only thing that’s missing today is that broad-scale societal movement that athletes use as scaffolding to make their statements.”
Marcellis Perkins watched intently from the other side of the country as the rhetoric around Kaepernick heated up. A sophomore forward on the Holy Cross men’s basketball team at the time, Perkins had long felt the pull of civic engagement while growing up in Hampton Roads, Virginia.
An advisor, sensing a need for allyship in a particularly fraught environment, suggested to Perkins and a handful of other athletes that they start meeting regularly in an effort to carve out a place for them to openly share their experiences.
During those early days the group, which became known as Men of Color Athletes (MOCA), would talk openly about Kaepernick’s commitment to his cause at a time it wasn’t unusual for them to hear criticism of the 49ers quarterback in their own locker rooms in Worcester, Massachusetts – a good 2,500 miles from San Francisco.
“I’m like well, if our coach says this or the captain of the team says this, how can we feel like we express ourselves or find the words to talk about what’s actually happening from our perspective without feeling like we’ll be penalized?” Perkins said. “And so the best thing we could do is create a space for ourselves where we can talk and share these resources, share these thoughts and better equip ourselves.”
Perkins, who now holds a doctorate in philosophy and is the program director for an entrepreneurship program at TCU, likened Kaepernick’s stand to ones made by predecessors Muhammad Ali and Jim Brown, only they were living through it, not reading about it in a book.
In Kaepernick, the men in MOCA saw “somebody reflecting and representing us and using their voice.” What began with a group of around 10 athletes quickly grew into 30 and laid the foundation for a women’s group.
On a personal level, Perkins watched Kaepernick deftly navigate the transition from athlete to former athlete, a path Perkins had to walk himself when injuries forced him to spend his final years at Holy Cross watching from the sideline.
Perkins has been heavily involved in several projects since moving to the Fort Worth area, including serving on a non-profit board that addresses health inequities and for a time, running an after-school program at an all-boys school. While Perkins has always felt pulled in this direction, Kaepernick provided more than a gentle nudge.
It’s one of the many ways ACLU President Deborah Archer told the AP that Kaepernick’s journey “set an example” for others to follow.
“He showed what they can do, the power that they have to start conversation,” she said after the organization presented Kaepernick with an activism award at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., in July. “For so long athletes, actors were told: That’s your lane, stay in your lane. He showed that there is no lane. We are all a part of this democracy, that we all have a right to speak, we all have an obligation to speak.”
An obligation that Kaepernick is perhaps even more fervently committed to now at 38 than he was at 28. Yes, speaking out came at a high personal cost. And yes, there will always be a segment of the populace whose judgment of him will begin and end with the image of Kaepernick on one knee while someone sings about “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
No, he did not make it to the Hall of Fame as some once thought might be possible. Yet for those like Perkins who were inspired by watching someone take a stand at deep personal cost in hopes of creating what Edwards likes to call the quest for a “more perfect union,” it hardly matters.
“I would hope and I would think that when he looks back on his legacy, he’ll say ‘I made the right decision because of all the lives that were impacted, all the lives that were changed,’ … that is a different level of greatness,” Perkins said. “The media might not celebrate it, but the people will. I think that’s all that matters.”
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AP Sports Writers Alanis Thames, Kristie Rieken, Doug Ferguson, Mark Long, Terry Tang and Dan Gelston contributed to this report.
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See AP’s full NFL coverage here
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