On Nov. 16, Colin Kaepernick, the free-agent quarterback at the center of sports’ most contentious labor dispute, held a workout on the football field at Charles R. Drew High School in Riverdale, Ga., a dozen miles south of Atlanta. In a livestream broadcast by a local NBC affiliate, Kaepernick could be seen doing the stuff athletes usually do when they arrive at workouts: chatting with onlookers, milling around, tapping at a phone, limbering up. Eventually he was joined by four other players, all unsigned wide receivers, and he began to throw some footballs. This was the main event: a chance for viewers — and, more to the point, a group of N.F.L. team scouts — to assess the skills and fitness of Kaepernick, who is 32 and hasn’t played a snap in a game since the 2016 season.
He looked good. Kaepernick’s mechanics and footwork were crisp; his arm strength was impressive. An N.F.L. executive told a reporter that Kaepernick’s talent remained “elite.” None of this made for great TV. The camerawork on the livestream was jittery and sometimes inept, with Kaepernick disappearing from view and his passes sailing out of frame. You could be forgiven for thinking it was the camera operator, not Kaepernick, who was returning to work after a long layoff.
Nine days later, a more riveting video emerged. This one distilled the workout to 55 seconds of highlights, including Kaepernick’s most impressive throws of the day, soaring bombs of 50-plus yards. The montage has the feel of a well-made ad: quick cuts, propulsive hip-hop soundtrack, stirring voice-over. “I’ve been ready for three years,” Kaepernick says. “I’ve been denied for three years.” The video appeared on the quarterback’s Twitter feed, and as is often the case with his social media posts, it captured the internet — the latest artifact of a yearslong saga that continues to convulse the football world.
A huge thank you to all the people that made this happen in ATL. From our receivers @brice_butler, @BruceElling10, @TheJordanVeasy, @ariwerts – my trainer Josh Hidalgo, the educators at Charles Drew HS & so many more. Can't thank everyone enough. We stay ready.?: @RAVisionMedia pic.twitter.com/2bwDjtlstN
In 2016, Kaepernick, who was then the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, staged a protest against racial injustice, refusing to stand for the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before games. He became a free agent at the end of the season and has gone unsigned in the years since. There is a widespread consensus that Kaepernick has been blackballed for his political views. Surely his exile isn’t based on football. Quarterback is the sport’s most important position, and Kaepernick is self-evidently a better player than several QBs currently on N.F.L. rosters. In 2017 he filed a grievance against the league, claiming that team owners had colluded to keep him out. The suit was withdrawn after a confidential settlement, but Kaepernick remained without a job, or even a tryout, until November, when — suddenly, bafflingly — N.F.L. officials invited him to work out in front of scouts at the Atlanta Falcons’ training facility.
It was a bizarre proposal, even a fishy one. The league does not typically stage tryouts; that’s something individual teams do. The abruptness of the offer, and the two-hour window Kaepernick was given to respond, suggested to many observers that something extra-strange was afoot, weird even by the standards of the N.F.L. Was the league’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, making the overture in good faith? Had this somehow been brokered by Jay-Z, whose entertainment company recently entered a partnership with the N.F.L.? Was it a sham, designed to let teams say they’d given Kaepernick an honest vetting and found him wanting? Or could it be a booby trap? In a statement, Kaepernick’s representatives said the N.F.L. had demanded the quarterback sign an unusual liability waiver, which the reporter and lawyer Mike Florio described as “a silver bullet that would defeat from the get-go any claims for collusion or retaliation related to Kaepernick’s ongoing unemployment.” He refused to sign, and shortly before the workout was to take place, he announced that he was moving it to the high school in Riverdale, an hour’s drive away. Of the 25 teams that had sent representatives to the Falcons’ facility, only eight made it to the alternative session.
There was another sticking point that prompted Kaepernick to move the workout: the question of video. The N.F.L. wanted to restrict recording to its own camera crew. Kaepernick, it has been reported, was concerned that the N.F.L. would edit the footage to suggest he was less than game-ready. He demanded that the tryout be open to press and to his own videographers.
This concern was understandable. Since 2016, the N.F.L. has shown an eagerness not merely to control the Kaepernick narrative, but to erase the story altogether — to edge the quarterback out of sight in order to keep him, and his uncomfortable politics, out of mind. But Kaepernick has refused to recede from view. Last year he appeared in a much-discussed Nike ad, exhorting viewers: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” Online, he posts videos showcasing his activism and his still-lively throwing arm. Kaepernick’s crusade — both his personal battle with the N.F.L. and his broader social-justice advocacy — has been waged largely through the medium of moving images.
If anyone understands the power of video, it is the executives at the N.F.L.’s Park Avenue headquarters. The league is as much a televisual enterprise as an athletic one. For decades, it has reshaped the game and its rules to create the most exciting and cinematic show: kinetic live-action drama, a pageant of speed and violence and guts and glory, captured from every imaginable angle by a dozen or more cameras, including those that whiz above the gridiron on zip lines and others mounted at ground level inside end-zone pylons. The spectacle is overlaid with displays of patriotism and jingoism, games that begin with the unfurling of giant American flags and fly overs by military jets.
The result is an aesthetic achievement and a political one — corporate propaganda at its most bombastic and seductive. The league goes to considerable lengths to create an illusion of transparency. Highlight reels produced by its movie studio, NFL Films, are full of vérité touches — players miked up during games, glimpses of locker-room celebrations. But in these packages, and in live broadcasts, the editing is meticulous, omitting anything that might discomfit the N.F.L.’s brass and team owners. The subject of Kaepernick, in particular, is verboten. Two weeks ago, the Houston Texans’ Kenny Stills caught a touchdown pass, ran to a TV camera and shouted “Free my boy Kaep!” — but NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” broadcast chose not to show his celebration. “I guess they cut to another angle,” Stills tweeted.
But Kaepernick has proved remarkably deft at seizing narrative control, too — outwitting the N.F.L.’s image makers through canny use of social media. The league, presumably, thought the Georgia workout would be a good move, publicitywise. But Kaepernick’s video performed P.R. jujitsu — a triumph of guerrilla “indie” filmmaking over the league’s studio product. The video ends with Kaepernick addressing the media. “We’re waiting for the 32 owners, the 32 teams, Roger Goodell, all of them to stop running,” he says. “Stop running from the truth. Stop running from the people. We’ll let you know if we hear from them. Ball’s in their court.”
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