Nike's Colin Kaepernick Ad Is a Watershed Moment

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

06 September 18

This is a thoroughgoing win for Kaepernick and his fellow players, and a thoroughgoing loss for the NFL.

confess to a measure of relief that, ever since he stood up by taking a knee, Colin Kaepernick will be getting paid by somebody while he obviously was being blackballed by the National Football League and its franchises. (Exhibits Q-W in Kaepernick's collusion case against the league came over the weekend when the Buffalo Bills named Nathan Peterman their opening day starter and then worked out Paxton Lynch, a first-round bust in Denver who'd been waived a couple of days earlier. I expect Sonny Jurgensen to get a call this week.)

However, the revelation that Kaepernick would be the face of Nike's 30th anniversary campaign—"Believe In Something Even If It Costs You Everything" is the slogan—shook up the dominant paradigm. After all, Nike has been the home office of so much of the inhumanity of the global economic system that seeing Kaepernick fronting for Phil Knight's International House of Sweatshops really kicks over the board. From The New York Times:

The first advertisement from Nike, one of the league’s top partners, debuted Monday afternoon, when Kaepernick tweeted it, assuring that his activism and the protest movement against racism and social injustice he started would continue to loom over one of the country’s most powerful sports leagues. Nike will produce new Kaepernick apparel, including a shoe and a T-shirt, and if the merchandise sells well, the value of the deal will rival those of other top N.F.L. players, according to people close to the negotiations who spoke on condition of anonymity because Nike had not formally announced it. Nike will also donate money to Kaepernick’s “Know Your Rights” campaign.

There's no question that this is a watershed. Kaepernick has managed to split Nike off from the NFL, enlist the company in his protest against police violence, encourage other players in their own protests, and do it all while putting some ill-gotten corporate money to good use, and putting a little of it into his own pocket as well. The deal is a thoroughgoing win for Kaepernick and his fellow players, and a thoroughgoing loss for the league. Various MAGA types have gone completely bananas; here are some people burning their Nike gear. But cold-eyed, soulless corporate creatures like Nike do not do things by accident. The company clearly thinks there's more to gain by making Kaepernick its public face than there is to lose, that it can make more money appealing to Kaepernick's supporters than it can by truckling to the shoe-burning crowd. That it is willing to take that gamble has a resonance far beyond the National Football League.