Colin Kaepernick’s message resonates after George Floyd’s death

Editor's note: Tony Grossi is a Cleveland Browns analyst for TheLandOnDemand.com and 850 ESPN Cleveland.

If you’re old enough to have viewed Monday Night Football on ABC in the 1970s, you may remember one of commentator Howard Cosell’s most memorable expressions.

“The knee … the knee … always the knee,” Cosell would intone solemnly as another football player would be carted off the field with the most serious injury of that era.

Some 50 years later, “the knee” has become the flash point symbol of American society’s troubled times.

In the 2016 NFL preseason, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the National Anthem to protest widespread police brutality and injustice against African-American men.

White America freaked out by tuning out the NFL.

One week ago today, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, a white man, pressed his knee to the neck of George Floyd for 8 minutes, 46 seconds while three other white Minneapolis police officers watched and heard Floyd plead, “I can’t breathe” before dying. Floyd’s crime was reportedly using a $20 bill in a deli which was suspected to be counterfeit.

America freaked out by protesting non-violently at first and then with looting and violence in major U.S. cities, including Cleveland this weekend.

Two knees.

Two images.

Two messages unheeded.

NFL in the middle

During the ongoing coronavirus pandemic still crippling U.S. and global sports, the NFL was considered fortunate because of its fall-to-winter calendar and its flexibility to adjust to fluid developments in the science of Covid-19.

But the mostly-black NFL is the sports league most ensnarled in the historical pandemic of racial injustice. And it isn’t distinguishing itself very well.

Kaepernick, 32, and in the prime of his athletic life, has not been employed since the 2016 season. He has been implicitly blackballed by NFL owners -- predominantly white male billionaires --who consider him a distraction and a turnoff to customers.

In an opinion piece written for CNN.com, Joe Lockhart, who was the NFL VP of communications and public affairs from 2016 to 2018, admitted that NFL owners kept Kaepernick on the street.

For the record, Lockhart, who was White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton, presided over some of the NFL’s most egregious PR failures (e.g. the Ray Rice domestic abuse scandal, Deflategate, and the Kaepernick protests). Lockhart was so out of his league that the NFL – steeped in PR savvy during the commissionership of Pete Rozelle in the 1960s through ‘80s – has not recovered from Lockhart’s failures. Lockhart “stepped down” from his NFL position in January of 2018.

Lockhart wrote of the Kaepernick protest and subsequent owners’ boycott of him, “ … it always came back to the same thing. Signing Kaepernick, they thought, was bad for business. An executive from one team that considered signing Kaepernick told me the team projected losing 20% of their season ticket holders if they did. That was a business risk no team was willing to take, whether the owner was a Trump supporter or a bleeding-heart liberal (yes, those do exist). As bad of an image problem it presented for the league and the game, no owner was willing to put the business at risk over this issue.”

Lockhart goes on to argue that the time is right for the NFL to bring back Kaepernick to the fold and employ him. He says the Minnesota Vikings “would send a strong message” by inviting Kaepernick to their camp because “it's something the city -- and all of America -- needs right now.”

I can’t think of a worse reason for the Vikings to sign Kaepernick now. How cheap would that be for the NFL, and the Vikings, to do? Oh, all of a sudden – with fires burning across America – signing Kaepernick would be the prudent thing to do? For what? To throw buckets of water on the racial tension inflaming in every U.S. city?

Does Lockhart really believe Kaepernick would agree to be used like that? How tone deaf must Lockhart be?

NFL owners considered Kaepernick too great of a distraction to bring to camp for three years.

Now it can be argued that the NFL is the distraction to a much greater social cause introduced by Kaepernick and highlighted once again by the killing of George Floyd.

Shameful record except for Browns

It’s amazing that Kaepernick is more relevant today than when he first took a knee – after three years of being blackballed and also being paid off by the NFL to settle a collusion grievance in February of 2019.

All of this comes at a time when the NFL poked itself in the eye yet again over its shameful record of minority hiring.

The league’s billionaire white owners have been so bad in following the spirit of its groundbreaking Rooney Rule for promoting minorities that it considered incentivizing teams with favorable draft picks for hiring men and women of color.

(Incidentally, Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam have been as progressive and inclusive as any owners in the NFL in this regard.

Since taking over active ownership of the Browns in 2013, the Haslams have hired three African-American general managers (Ray Farmer, Sashi Brown and Andrew Berry), one African-American head coach (Hue Jackson), four African-American offensive or defensive coordinators (Pep Hamilton, Ray Horton, Steve Wilks and Joe Woods), plus several other minorities in high-level administration and football operations capacities.

Additionally, the Haslams have fostered a healthy dialogue with team leaders and community law enforcement officers to promote a greater understanding of relations between the African-American community and police.)

As professional sports get back on their feet with the Covid-19 pandemic subsiding somewhat, the death of George Floyd returns attention to the humanity and racial issues that have ripped apart America for hundreds of years.

“Taking a knee” has always been the happy metaphor for winning a game in the NFL. The so-called victory formation calls for the quarterback to kneel himself down after a final snap to secure his team’s victory.

But now “the knee” has a hugely different meaning.

As Howard Cosell told us 50 years ago, “The knee … the knee … always the knee.”