None of this brotherhood could develop without our coach, Pete Carroll, the man who gets younger every year. Coach Carroll is one of the few NFL coaches who are comfortable letting people be who they want to be. Everyone on the team also knows that when Coach Carroll was the big cheese at the University of Southern California, a private college in South Central Los Angeles, he didn’t hang out in the ivory tower. He went into Compton and Crenshaw to speak with players who were dealing with gang issues and lives that were torn apart, not just to recruit them for his team but as mentoring work. So when Pete Carroll walks into an African American family’s home and tells a player’s parents, “I’m going to take care of your son,” and means what he says, it builds up a lot of trust. He understands that people are individuals. A lot of coaches in the NFL, and coaches in general, want players to reflect their own ego. A coach who’s uptight and stressed out wants his players to be as anxious and unhappy as he is. But Pete is the opposite: his open-mindedness has let people be their true selves. We have a locker room full of characters. Pete has opened up the door for them to speak their minds, and it’s letting them grow into men.
Pete also understands that there are some people on this team who come from difficult situations, and others who do not. He doesn’t see all Black players as a mass. That’s important because it means we trust him when he comes to us.
Our brotherhood has been earned the hard way. It comes from winning the Super Bowl against Denver in 2014 and then losing against New England the next year. We have our scars, and we wear them like medals. We collaborate to inspire each other, and we support each other even when we disagree. Collaboration and solidarity are so important when you’re trying to change things. This came together for us in a whole new way when Kaepernick first took that knee in August 2016.
After Kaepernick made his stand, I spoke to him on the phone, along with thirty or forty other players on the line, to discuss what we could do to offer support. People were arguing, and it was chaos. Finally, I said to everybody, “Do what you feel is right. It doesn’t have to be taking a knee. It could be doing a back-flip. We don’t all have to agree on the idea of what we need to do, but we all have to agree on the message. The message needs to be that there are a lot of racial injustices going on in America. However you want to make a stance, be like Nike and just do it. And as long as that message goes out to everybody, it will be great.” But the media focused more on who was or wasn’t taking a knee than on the message. That’s propaganda and the disinformation machine at its finest.
In the Seahawks locker room, we did something before opening day that I bet few teams did. Pete Carroll brought us together and we talked for hours about the issues animating Colin’s move. We decided, as a team, to link arms before the opening game of the season, held on the explosively patriotic fifteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The NFL had all kinds of military tributes planned for that day, and even though Colin’s protest—all together now, for the thousandth time—had nothing to do with the military, it was a dicey atmosphere for planning an action. Some people criticized us for linking arms during the anthem, saying we should have done nothing but put our hands on our hearts. Other people were critical from the opposite perspective, angry that we didn’t all take a knee or burn a jersey at the fifty-yard line, because we’re the big, bad, outspoken Seahawks. But not every player is out there and political, and we agreed to do something that we could all buy into. Like I told the media afterward, I’ve got three kids, and if I ask what they want to eat for dinner, they are all going to say something different. It’s hard to get people to agree on a plan, and at the end of that emotional, hours-long meeting, when we all agreed to link arms, I felt like it was a big deal for us to come together—Black players, white players—and connect on one gesture. We wanted to do something symbolic of bringing the community together, and that’s what we did.
Linking arms also was a good organizing principle. It allowed us to involve the widest layer of people on the team. Instead of just a couple of us taking a knee, we wanted to expand it. The criticisms afterward, especially from people who supported Kaepernick, were hard to hear, and, in my view, they also aided the people who wanted to shut us up and shut us down. I believe that you have to meet people where they are at, and the easiest way to disable a whole bunch of folks is to turn them against each other. That didn’t happen. Our goal was to plant the seeds in the locker room and in these communities where we work and are seen as role models. We also wanted to pose an all-important question to everyone, not just players: “If you are concerned about these issues, what’s next? What are you prepared to do?”
The message didn’t get out there as much as I wanted, but for me, linking arms was a way to say, “If we’re going to talk it, we’ve got to
