Last week US president Donald Trump told an audience in Alabama that those athletes of the NFL who disrespected the pre-match playing of the national anthem should be sacked. He said team owners should “get that son-of-a-bitch off the field right now”.
The protest whereby a growing number of athletes across different US sports refused to stand for the anthem began with San Francisco 49ers player Colin Kaepernick in August 2016. Kaepernick’s justification was simple: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of colour”.
Kaepernick’s stance was motivated by his support for the Black Lives Matter movement that has, since 2013, highlighted issues relating to violent treatment of blacks in the United States by law enforcement agencies.
At the end of the 2016 NFL season, Kaepernick opted out of his contract with the 49ers to become a free agent. For the 2017 season he has failed to find a team that will employ him, and most observers argue it was his anthem protest, rather than a dip in performance, that has left him without a team.
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In March this year, Trump took credit for Kaepernick’s effective unemployment by saying,“NFL owners don’t want to pick him because they don’t want to get a nasty tweet from Donald Trump.” So with Kaepernick sidelined, and the athlete protests against standing for the anthem seemingly losing support and profile, why did Trump reignite the issue last week and what does it all mean?
Shunned
Protests such as Kaepernick’s aren’t new. In 1968, the American sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith made headlines when they gave the black power salute from the Olympic podium in Mexico City.
The pair were treated harshly for their protest. They were removed from the Olympic Village that night and returned to a United States that shunned them. They were dismissed as revolutionaries by the then vice-president Spiro Agnew and refused a post-Games invite to the White House by the president, Lyndon Johnson, (something Trump did last weekend in rescinding an invite to the NBA champions, the Golden State Warriors, after one player, Stephen Curry, expressed discomfort at the initial invite to attend the White House).
Both protests, in 1968 and 2016-17, centred on the question of racial equality in the US. Both were undertaken by athletes in a world of sport which, we are constantly told, is supposed to be a non-political space. However, because sport is meant to be non-political, protests in and around sport have great power.
The teams of the NFL responded as the best teams do, standing as one against the perceived threat to their unity
Olympic boycotts grab the attention, the anti-apartheid movement’s greatest success was in galvanising people behind the sporting boycott of South Africa, and the actions of Carlos, Smith and Kaepernick start debates beyond the field of play.
Easy target
Last week in Alabama, Trump thrust politics into American sport. He no doubt thought the millionaire players of the NFL were an easy target, and that his support base would approve him calling out those who he saw as dishonouring the US. Of course, he could have simply ignored the anthem protests and let them wither away.
But in denouncing protesting players as unAmerican, Trump misunderstood something about sport. True, he may have appealed to his core support in a state such as Alabama, but once he had called the athletes out, demanded that their owners sack them, Trump failed to recognise a key power dynamic in sport: the team.
On Sunday at NFL matches in London and across the US teams stood together in protest. The teams were supported by their management teams, their owners as well as by the NFL itself.
The teams of the NFL, whatever any individual player may think about the validity of the race debate, stood together, raised fists or kneeled as one. They were not protesting against racial inequality in the United States, but were honouring the rights of individual players, their team mates, to do so.
Trump had threatened discord and disagreement, had tried to divide players from each other, and players from owners. The most basic sport psychology tells us that a divided dressing room is a losing dressing room. The teams of the NFL responded as the best teams do, standing as one against the perceived threat to their unity from the president.
Sunday’s protests had little to do with race politics. They had everything to do with the team mentality and its unity when being attacked from the outside.
Message to Trump
It will be fascinating to see where the protests go across the remainder of the NFL season. It won’t start a nationwide conversation about the value of black lives, and it probably won’t arrest the steady decline in NFL audiences.
What it will do is send a message to Trump and his supporters that the professional athletes of the NFL work together and support each other. They take a stance and fight as one. And no one, not even the president of the United States, can disrupt that bond. Teamwork is key in sport if the game is to be won.
Perhaps the president, rather than dismissing the athletes of the NFL as overpaid, self-interested irrelevances, might take a lesson from this. Together, in sport, as in life, people are stronger when the team supports and believes in each other.
Prof Mike Cronin is the academic director of Boston College in Ireland