On Tuesday, amid news that the team-less quarterback Colin Kaepernick would be the new face of Nike’s thirtieth-anniversary “Just Do It” campaign, David Meggyesy, a retired N.F.L. activist, mused about Marxist dialectics and the echoes of 1968. “This is not a new story, but it keeps coming around,” he said. “The co-option versus the message, that’s always been going on. Advertisers, they figure it out. It’s how the fucking system works—and blatantly, at that!” Meggyesy is a Kaepernick supporter, to be clear, and “not a Marxist, necessarily,” he said, while noting the coincidence that we were talking “the day after Labor Day.” He’d been reading an interview with Cornel West, in which the public intellectual discussed his expulsion from school, as a third grader, for refusing to salute the flag. (“My great-uncle had been lynched when he’d come out of the Army, and his killers had wrapped a flag around his body. So when my teacher told me to salute that same flag, I said no.”) “He nails it on many levels,” Meggyesy said, of West. “And LeBron and Serena, I saw this morning they’re supporting Colin. Of course, I would love to see some of the white players really say something to make a statement as well. If you had Aaron Rodgers or Tom Brady lay it out there: ‘Colin, you got fucked. You’re a great player. It’s a fucking travesty—and Trump, you’re a fucking asshole.’ But we’re all sleepwalking.”
Meggyesy, who played seven years as a linebacker for the St. Louis Cardinals, was, in a sense, the original Kaepernick: a dissident who was accused of disrespecting the national anthem in a sport with a culture that has long celebrated authoritarian deference. Thinking back to fifty years ago, he recalled that Super Bowl II, in January of 1968, had featured the début of the military-flyover tradition, at the conclusion of “The Star-Spangled Banner”—an innovation of the N.F.L. commissioner at the time, Pete Rozelle. “Pete jumped into bed with the Nixon sensibility,” Meggyesy said. Then October brought the Summer Olympics, in Mexico City, where the African-American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists in a black-power salute on the medal podium, leading to their expulsion from the Olympic Village. “Orders came down from Rozelle,” Meggyesy recalled. When the anthem played before N.F.L. games, “you had to line up along the sideline, holding your helmet in your left arm, against your armpit, and your right hand on your heart, while turning toward the flag.” Meggyesy refused. “I stood there, but I was bowing my head—not on my knee—and had my helmet hanging by my side,” he said. He also shuffled his feet: a nervous rebel, not a picture of poised defiance worthy of a sneaker campaign. “Clearly, I was the one person doing it,” he said, adding that his teammates were “squeaky clean.”
“For me, it was two things,” Meggyesy continued. “No. 1, being told how to salute the flag—don’t tell me what to do!—and No. 2 was my antiwar sentiment. I just thought, This is bullshit—the indignity of realizing the N.F.L. is supporting the war by being super patriotic. I’m protesting that they’re trying to support the Vietnam War with Nixon and Agnew and all the boys.”
A local columnist objected, as did some Cardinals fans on a radio call-in show. Meggyesy was summoned to a midnight meeting at the home of his defensive coach, Chuck Drulis. “He basically said, ‘You’ve got to stop what you’re doing, or you’re going to be cut,’ ” Meggyesy went on. “I was furious about it. I said, ‘What does this have to do with football?’ I got my friend Irving Louis Horowitz, who was a sociologist at Washington University, in St. Louis, and he counselled me in writing a letter to Cardinal management, saying essentially, ‘Don’t fuck with us, or we’re going to fuck with you.’ ”
Meggyesy’s private opposition to the war grew more formal, and he started hosting meetings for other citizen activists at his house, and paying for buses to deliver them to marches in Washington, D.C., and New York City. “I was into it, but I wasn’t public about it,” he said. Nonetheless, he started converting some of his previously apolitical teammates, and, in 1969, he got more than thirty of them to sign a letter to their local congressman, calling for a withdrawal of American troops. “Then, suddenly, a couple weeks later, I’m benched,” he said.
He retired after the 1969 season, at age twenty-eight, and wrote a kind of exposé, “Out of Their League,” that is sometimes likened to Jim Bouton’s “Ball Four,” for its revelations about, among other things, rampant trainer-approved drug use among his fellow professional athletes. Appearing on “The Dick Cavett Show,” to promote the book, alongside a chain-smoking Janis Joplin, Meggyesy said that football, which “bent my head around in some strange ways,” amounted to “Middle America’s theatre—Nixon’s theatre.” The opiate of the silent majority. Ahead of his time by a generation or two, he also told Cavett that he thought college football players represented “one of the most exploited minorities in the country,” because their compensation amounted to about twenty-five cents an hour. He later worked as an executive in the N.F.L. Players Association, where, he told me, his work primarily consisted of telling young football players, “Wake up, boys!”
I thought again of Meggyesy, and of his complicated feelings about football and Nixon, while watching the league’s season opener, in Philadelphia, between the Falcons and the Eagles, on Thursday night. It marked the beginning of the N.F.L.’s ninety-ninth season, at a moment that is sometimes described as “peak football”—a nod both to the sport’s cultural hegemony and to its perceived vulnerability amid concussion concerns, cord-cutting, divisive politics, and the occasional ineptitude of the current commissioner, Roger Goodell. I’d been reading Mark Leibovich’s new book, “Big Game: The N.F.L. in Dangerous Times,” which posits, in the introduction, that the country’s dominant form of entertainment, in the age of President Trump, “no longer felt safely bubbled off from the messiness and politics of the larger American reality show,” as though this were a phenomenon without precedent. Leibovich, a national correspondent for the Times Magazine and a lifelong Patriots fanatic, writes that, for years, he’d “resisted sports as anything but a walled-off object of my mental energy—toys to play with on the side of all the serious,” only to find that, once he’d started immersing himself in the N.F.L. as a reporter, it no longer seemed like a “respite” from his day job. Trumpism was inescapable.
An important difference between fifty years ago and now, Meggyesy stressed, was that Nixon was using football to sell an actual war, and it wasn’t much of a stretch for Rozelle, the commissioner, to imagine that his league’s players might project an obedient, clean-cut image that reflected their own cultural backgrounds. Meggyesy, as he told Cavett, grew up in a “cow town,” the son of a farmer. The teams’ rosters at the time were more than seventy-per-cent white. Trump, on the other hand, is selling only nostalgia (for the days of guilt-free bell ringers, say) to a base that has little in common with the majority of the players on the field, seventy per cent of whom now are African-American. With only a few exceptions, it seems, he doesn’t want you to root for the men on the field. Nor does he want you to root for Goodell (“a weak guy,” he’s said). And he doesn’t want you to root for the owners, either, who represent a club that wouldn’t have him as a member. “Big Game,” in fact, suggests an alternative origin story to the Trump Presidency: maybe it wasn’t set in motion by Barack Obama’s mockery at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, in 2011 but, rather, by Trump’s failure, a few years later, to acquire the Buffalo Bills, two decades after having been coldly rebuffed by Rozelle. (“In the end, a seat at the N.F.L. Membership table is so exclusive that even the White House itself has become a consolation prize,” Leibovich writes.) In celebrating the N.F.L.’s declining TV viewership (“WAY DOWN,” Trump tweeted recently), the President may not be using football for any purpose other than to prove himself the only remaining ratings giant in American life.
In any event, the anthem in Philly, delayed nearly an hour by stormy weather, and sung a cappella by Boyz II Men, seems not to have aroused the ire of Trump or his Nike-burning supporters. The safety Malcolm Jenkins, a co-founder of the Players Coalition, placed his hands behind his back, instead of raising a fist in the air, as he has done in the past. The defensive end Michael Bennett paced the sideline and finally sat on a bench to tie his shoes. In 1968, it might have passed for disrespect. Kaepernick’s Nike ad—long since viewed and digested on the Internet by anyone inclined to strong opinions on the subject—aired during the third quarter. The game went on.
