Colin Kaepernick is 38 and has not played an NFL game since Jan. 1, 2017, yet he still trains before sunrise every morning like a starter getting ready for Sunday. His memoir, The Perilous Fight, came out Sept. 15 and debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction list, BlackSportsOnline reported. Ten years after he first sat and then knelt during the national anthem, he says he still wants back in the league.
Not everyone wants him there. Hall of Fame linebacker Brian Urlacher said this week on OutKick’s “The Craig Carton Show” that kneeling would have been a line in the sand in his locker room. He added that he and his wife stopped watching pro football for a few years over the protests. So the decade ends the way it began, with one man, one knee and a country still arguing about it. One question remains, and Kaepernick answered it without hesitation.
Why is Colin Kaepernick still training?
He refuses to let the league decide how his story ends. At the Black Footwear Forum in Detroit this month, he told Jemele Hill that no one should lose a career for fighting for their community. He also wants to undo the message he believes the NFL sent. A young player at one of his Know Your Rights Camps in Las Vegas once asked him whether to choose football or his community, and Kaepernick says no young person should have to pick. His most recent tryout came in 2022 with the Las Vegas Raiders.
Who came up with taking a knee?
It was his teammate Eric Reid. The protest started quietly on Aug. 14, 2016, when an injured Kaepernick sat on a cooler during the preseason anthem. Almost no one noticed until NFL Network reporter Steve Wyche asked him about it. Reid later suggested kneeling to answer critics who called sitting disrespectful, and Kaepernick first knelt on Sept. 1, 2016. He disputes the popular story that military veteran Nate Boyer suggested the idea.
The reasons were personal. Nessa Diab, now his wife, gave him The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Then came the police killings of Mario Woods in San Francisco, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Minnesota.
What did the NFL and Trump want from him?
It was more than most people know. Kaepernick says that while his collusion grievance was underway, the league offered him and Reid a multimillion dollar deal to become the faces of a social justice campaign. He turned it down. He also told The Guardian that Trump’s team called his lawyers around 2017 or 2018 asking for a meeting. He called it an easy no and suspected it was a photo op. The NFL settled his grievance in 2019 for an undisclosed sum, and Commissioner Roger Goodell has denied that Kaepernick was blackballed.
He saved his sharpest words for Jay-Z. Roc Nation partnered with the NFL in 2019, and in a freestyle at Yankee Stadium in July, Jay-Z mentioned Kaepernick and brought up the idea of him taking a check. Kaepernick says going through a grievance process is nothing like helping the league turn attention to a halftime show. For him, the real question is whether people are trying to come up alone or together.
Would Colin Kaepernick kneel again?
Yes, without question. He told The Guardian that if an NFL team signed him, he would kneel during the anthem again. He says the work is unfinished and people’s lives are still at stake. A decade later, with a settled grievance, a bestselling book and a 4 year old daughter, his answer has not changed.
