Kaepernick Knee: Why UK sports chiefs will be getting twitchy over Colin Kaepernick’s act of defiance

Dan Jones4 September 2018

Rather improbably, the American football player Colin Kaepernick uses as his Twitter biography a quote from the one-time leader of the Conservative party, Iain Duncan Smith MP.

‘Never underestimate the determination of a quiet man,’ it reads.

When the quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers collides with the MP for Chingford and Woodford Green, it can be called a rather unlikely collision of sport and politics. But slamming sport and politics together is Kaepernick’s thing.

He is a passionate advocate of black rights and black lives and a critic of what he (and others) see as institutionalised racism within American society and he has started using his status as a platform for protest.

For several weeks, Kaepernick has been refusing to stand for the national anthem that precedes every NFL match, lately preferring a one-legged kneel. It is a simple, worldless act of defiance which he says symbolises an unwillingness to “show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of colour”.

Twitter/Kaepernick7

Now other players, both professional and recreational, are joining in, liking both the Snapchat-friendly, iconic simplicity of the gesture and the prescience of the issue in a league in which nearly 70 per cent of players are black.

You can bet anything you like that within the next couple of weeks the Kaepernick Knee will have reached full meme status and that here in London there will be British sportsmen or sportswomen doing it: some out of solidarity and some (since this is how things work) because they think it’s kinda cool and their Instagram followers will like it.

The NFL is lukewarm on the Kaepernick issue, owing perhaps to the fact that a large swathe of its audience are conservative, patriotic and white.

The league’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, decided a couple of days ago that for now it is possible to have his corn-dog and eat it: he says he disagrees with Kaepernick but is happy for him to continue to protest.

Of course, you don’t have to look very far beyond the NFL to find politicians, celebrities and many basic dimwits who hate the protest and all it stands for. One police chief says he thinks players who blank the national anthem forfeit their right to security on their way to games. The actor James Woods says Kaepernick is “a piece of s***” and that he isn’t going to watch football ever again — as though this were football’s loss.

You can imagine the lower-grade internet-level hate gobbets for yourself.

If and when the Kaepernick protest crosses the Atlantic, we will have a bit of head-scratching to do. As a rule, sports governing bodies in this country get twitchy about athletes making any non-sanctioned expressions of their political views, whatever they may be.

I am thinking here of the brouhaha that surrounds West Brom winger James McClean’s refusal to wear a remembrance poppy on his shirt every November; or the trouble that blew up around England cricketer Moeen Ali when he went out to bat against India wearing ‘Save Gaza’ and ‘Free Palestine’ wristbands during the third Test against India in 2014.

We can cast our minds back to 1997 and remember Robbie Fowler being fined by Uefa for wearing a T-shirt expressing his support for sacked Liverpool dockers, or look back to last week, when Paolo di Canio was sacked as a TV pundit in Italy for revealing his infamous DUX tattoo, which many people think advertises his fascist beliefs. (Di Canio flatly denies sharing fascist ideology and says he respects everyone).

Regardless of ideology, the history of sport and protest is long and generally unhappy. Muhammad Ali was mourned as a hero and a legend when he died this year but in the 1960s his politics made him one of the most hated men in America. John Carlos and Tommie Smith remain notorious for their black power salutes on the podium at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

Thoughtfulness and sportfulness are not allowed to be natural playmates and all too often the world prefers its athletes in a state of suspended infantilism: seen and not heard. Quiet men. Sometimes, though, the quiet men cannot be ignored.

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