COMMENTARY: Pat Tillman, Not Colin Kaepernick, Is An Athlete Who Sacrificed Everything

I’ve got hand it to Colin Kaepernick for finding a way to prolong his 15 minutes of fame and his mediocre NFL career into something that even gets the president of the United States talking. He at least deserves credit for that. From that perspective, the guy is brilliant.

Now we get our third consecutive NFL season being distracted from the actual game by a guy who’s not even in the league anymore, and likely will never be signed to another NFL team.

Kaepernick’s career as an NFL player is over and he has no one to blame but himself. He had a few good seasons, but after Jim Harbaugh left for Michigan, he was a train wreck at quarterback. (To be fair, the whole 49ers team was a train wreck after Harbaugh left.)

Then he decides to start kneeling during the national anthem, and viola, his career after football is born.

I would love to see Kaepernick sit down in a conversation with some widows of dead soldiers and cops, or be interviewed by someone like Ben Shapiro, just to see how much he really knows about sacrifice and the history of oppression in the United States. I doubt he ever would because he would likely embarrass himself.

After all, this is a guy who used to wear socks with pictures of cops as pigs on them during practice, and who apparently admires Cuban communist tyrant Fidel Castro enough to wear t-shirts with his picture on them.

It was funny watching Roger Goodell and the NFL briefly grow a spine by requiring players to stand and show respect during the anthem – like every other major professional sport in the U.S. requires its players to do – only to collapse like a house of cards as soon as the player’s union started squawking about it. Meanwhile, the NFL’s ratings and public perception keeps falling, but they don’t seem to care.

Now we’re supposed to applaud Colin Kaepernick for supposedly “sacrificing everything” according to Nike. What exactly did Kaepernick sacrifice? An NFL career that was already on the downslide in exchange for a lucrative deal with Nike?

This becomes especially hypocritical when there is an example of a former NFL player who really did sacrifice everything. The late Pat Tillman of the Cardinals left a successful NFL career to become an Army Ranger after the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and was killed in the line of duty.

That is sacrificing everything.

If Colin Kaepernick, Richard Sherman, Doug Baldwin, Michael Bennett and the rest of the Kaepernick supporters want to do something about social justice, this isn’t how to go about it. They’re not winning anyone over who wasn’t already on their side. They’re just alienating themselves, and the league who signs their checks, from many of their fans.

I blame the NFL even more for allowing it grow into this. They could’ve nipped it in the bud as soon as it began. Or in the NBA’s case, before it even began.

I’ll keep watching the games because I know there’s a lot of players in the NFL who know the flag and national anthem shouldn’t be exploited as a means social justice protest, and that there are better, more persuasive ways to use their platform and communicate that type of message to those who might need to hear it. They quietly understand how fortunate they are to get paid to play in the NFL, and they just want to play their hearts out for their respective teams. I’ll keep watching for those guys, especially my Seahawks. Those that don’t fall into that category don’t have my hate or derision – just my indifference.

If it’s attention they want, then that’s what I won’t give them as soon as they take that knee, and neither should anyone else who feels the same. If they want to have a discussion about social justice, then let’s have a discussion – off the field.

I know I’m giving them that attention by writing this blog post, but from here on out, I just want to watch football.