Colin Kaepernick may have blown his chance of getting signed by the Baltimore Ravens, and he may have his girlfriend to thank for it.
The 29-year-old free agent quarterback hasn’t spoken to the public in quite a while, but that hasn’t stopped his girlfriend, Nessa Diab, from speaking her mind. Unfortunately for Kaepernick, one of her latest comments may have stopped the Ravens from bringing the quarterback in.
Free agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick and girlfriend Nessa Diab. (Photos/AP and Twitter)
When reports first surfaced that the Baltimore-based NFL franchise was interested in Kaepernick, former Ravens legend Ray Lewis appeared on a Fox Sports 1 network show to offer insight as an insider on the situation. Obviously, Lewis has strong ties with the Ravens’ front office and may have been privy to the team’s discussions of Kaep.
But when Lewis suggested on the show that Kaepernick should stay quiet on his off-field activism, Kaepernick’s supporters were outraged, including Diab.
Diab, a popular talk show host for the nationally syndicated Hot97 radio station based in New York City, took to Twitter to voice her outrage, tweeting a photo of Ray Lewis affectionately holding Ravens owner Steve Biscotti after a championship win. The photo was cropped on top of another image that showed Samuel L. Jackson portraying a house slave holding his slave master, portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, in the movie Django Unchained.
The tweet insinuated that Diab was comparing Biscotti to a slave master and Lewis to nothing more than a slave-master-loving house slave.
Kaepernick hasn’t made any public comments to denounce or separate himself from the assumed connotation of his girlfriend’s tweet, and perhaps that may play a part in why the Ravens never went on to bring in the talented quarterback.
It’s hard to imagine that Biscotti, or any of his staff members, would want to hire someone that would consider him a slave master.
But it wasn’t just Biscotti who may have been turned off by Diab’s tweet. According to longtime sports journalist Skip Bayless, the tweet was enough to make NFL legend John Wooten give up on his efforts to publicly back Kaepernick.
Bayless said on his FS1 show that Wooten, a former Black offensive lineman for the Cleveland Browns during the 1960s and current chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance (a group that works in conjunction with the NFL to advocate on behalf of minority coaches, scouts and front office personnel), had contacted him several times over the last month, expressing how furious he was over the fact that Kaepernick hadn’t been signed yet. Bayless said Wooten had called it the greatest injustice in NFL history, and that Wooten wanted to organize a summit, where a group of Black high profile athletes all came together to support Kaepernick and his cause.
It would’ve been a summit similar to that when Black A-list athletes came together in 1967 to back Muhammad Ali’s protest of the military draft. African-American stars like Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabar and Jim Brown all showed up in support of Ali’s cause, but what many people don’t know is that Wooten was one of the organizers behind that legendary summit.
Wooten wanted to do the same for Kaepernick, but all of his attempts to reach out and contact the quarterback were left unmet.
Bayless said Wooten had grown frustrated that he hadn’t been able to get a reply from Kaepernick and that Diab’s tweet was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“I’m out,” is how Bayless described Wooten’s words on Kaepernick.
Perhaps Wooten felt Diab’s tweet was classless, or maybe it’s a combination of that along with the fact that Kaepernick won’t talk to him, which rubbed Wooten the wrong way. Either way, it may have hurt Kaepernick’s chances of getting back on the football field.
Wooten is a very influential man, not only among NFL decision makers but also among corporate America in general. He’s the kind of man Kaepernick needs in his corner, and it’s sad that perhaps a careless tweet may have wrecked the chances of these two uniting.
