Why ESPN's Michael Wilbon believes Colin Kaepernick is 'an unfortunate messenger'
COLLEGE PARK, Md. — More than a year after he first took a knee during the national anthem, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick largely keeps out of the public eye. He has filed a collusion grievance against NFL owners but has otherwise remained relatively silent as other players have taken up his protest against racial inequality and police brutality.
And that, ESPN analyst Michael Wilbon said Tuesday, is just one of the reasons Kaepernick will never be on the same level as some of sports' past civil rights leaders.
"He’s an unfortunate messenger in a lot of ways,” Wilbon said. “You have this platform, and you don’t use it or know how to use it, you’re quiet, you’re not particularly eloquent on the issue. … You have access to be all these things, and you haven’t."
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Wilbon spoke Tuesday night at the University of Maryland's Shirley Povich Symposium, joining his Pardon the Interruption co-host, Tony Kornheiser, on a panel that also included Paste BN Sports columnist Christine Brennan and NBC's Bob Costas.
During a question-and-answer session, an audience member asked the group to comment on Kaepernick's collusion grievance and future in the NFL. Wilbon said he predicted long ago that Kaepernick would be blacklisted and "he's not ever coming back." Costas agreed that it will be extremely difficult to prove collusion.
"Unless you've got a smoking gun of an email, they'll be able to say, most teams, 'Oh, Colin Kaepernick doesn't fit our system, he's not the player he once was,'" Costas said.
Brennan believes Kaepernick will be studied in history classes 20 or 30 years from now, in the same way that prominent sports figures like Curt Flood and Billie Jean King are studied today. "Donald Trump ensured that when he crash-landed into this story in Huntsville, Alabama, at the end of September," she said.
Costas and Wilbon disagreed. While Costas praised Kaepernick's community involvement, charitable donations and intentions, he said that does not make him "the natural heir to Muhammad Ali."
“He’s gone radio silent, and when he does speak, he often says things that undermine his position,” Costas said. “We can praise him and respect him for the good he’s done, but not say that, hey, Muhammad Ali is figuratively handing the torch to him. To Doug Baldwin? Yeah. To Anquan Boldin? Maybe. To Malcolm Jenkins? Maybe.”
Wilbon took issue with the fact that Kaepernick did not vote in the 2016 presidential election, saying the quarterback "lost me" when he claimed that his vote would not change an inherently oppressive system.
"Michael Bennett said more in about an hour after determining what it is that his agenda was than Kaepernick has in an entire six, eight months," Wilbon said. "Look, I admire what he did ... but this is not John Carlos and Tommie Smith."
Contact Tom Schad at tschad@gannett.com or on Twitter @Tom_Schad.
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