THE DUOPOLY WATCH | Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Colin Kaepernick is a quarterback
for the San Francisco 49ers in the National Football League. A former
star, he led his team to the championship game, the Super Bowl, for two
consecutive seasons, those of 2012 and 2013. The team lost both games,
but it did get there. Since then his own star has been in the decline,
in part due to injury. The pre-season speculation has been the he will
not be the team’s starting quarterback this year. He is still getting
paid well, having signed a lucrative contract after his second
consecutive Super Bowl season.
But right now, the talk about Kaepernick does not concern football. One
has to say that there is likely more talk now about Kaepernick, the
political figure, than there ever has been about him as a football
player. That’s
because it involves people who are only vaguely aware of what the Super
Bowl actually is, as well as die-hard football fans. Of course that is all due to the National Anthem controversy that Kaepernick caused last week. It
happens that, for reasons which are not entirely understood, the
“Star-Spangled Banner” is played, often sung by a soloist or chorus, and
sometimes by the whole attending crowd as well, before virtually every
sporting event held in the United States. (In
fact, and I never thought about why this is so, it has been played
before virtually every amateur race that I do as a tri- and duathlete
for the last 34 years, usually involving only a few hundred competitors
and spectators.)
One is expected to stand during the playing of the Anthem and face the U.S. flag if one is flying. In some circumstances, one is also expected to place one’s hand over one’s heart. (The U.S. Olympic gold medal gymnast Gabby Douglas [like Kaepernick, an African-American — that
couldn’t have anything to do with the controversies, could it?] took a
huge amount of heat for [unintentionally] not placing her hand over her
heart during one of the playings of the U.S. national anthem at an award
ceremony during the recent Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.) But
Colin Kaepernick has now made a national issue, not just of
hand-over-heart-placing, but over whether every professional athlete
should stand during it.
According to his Wikipedia entry:
“During
a post-game interview he was asked why he sat down and stated, ‘I am
not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that
oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than
football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There
are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away
with murder.’ The 49ers also released a statement which said, ‘The
national anthem is and always will be a special part of the pre-game
ceremony. It is an opportunity to honor our country and reflect on the
great liberties we are afforded as its citizens. In respecting such
American principles as freedom of religion and freedom of expression, we
recognize the right of an individual to choose and participate, or not,
in our celebration of the national anthem.’ “
The uproar has been tremendous. A retired NFK quarterback, “Boomer” Esiason, (like Kaepernick a two-time Super Bowl loser), now a sportscaster on both radio and TV, ripped him up and down for daring to introduce politics into football. (Kaepernick did get a good deal of support from other [African-American, of course] football players.) But
of course, it’s not the politics itself that Boomer was objecting to,
but rather the particular politics that Kaepernick was expressing (see
the above the quote). And aye, there’s the rub.
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