John Halloran
Like most reporters in the realm of women’s soccer, I lead a double-life.
It feels like a dirty little secret most of the time—I’m not sure why—but almost all of us work full-time jobs outside of WoSo and do our reporting in our free time, mostly on nights and weekends. And for whatever reason, most of us keep those two lives separate, rarely merging our “real life” with our WoSo life.
I bring all of this up for two reasons, one of which I’ll get to now and the other one later.
On September 4, 2016, in my role as a reporter on women’s soccer, I drove down to Bridgeview for a game between the Chicago Red Stars and the Seattle Reign. Honestly, I don’t remember a single thing about the match itself because of what happened before it even kicked off—with Megan Rapinoe kneeling during the playing of the national anthem.
There were only a handful of reporters there for the Sunday night game and, to be honest, I wasn’t even sure if what I saw was an intentional protest. Rapinoe had been battling injuries that whole year and didn’t start that evening. Yes, it was a month after NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick had started his anthem protest, but for all I knew, Rapinoe might have been in the middle of a hip flexor stretch when the song began.
Nobody in the press box said a word about it—I asked myself if anyone else even noticed it—and everyone just went about their business.
After the game, I asked to speak with Rapinoe and she agreed to talk to the media in the post-game press conference. My question to her was two-part. First, I wanted to know if she was kneeling on purpose. Second, if it had been done on purpose, I wanted to know why.
In the small room that serves as a press room underneath the stands at then-Toyota Park, she confirmed that she had knelt intentionally and explained that it was in solidarity with Kaepernick’s protest.
That acknowledgement set off a crazy series of events over the next two weeks. First, there was the widespread vitriol directed at Rapinoe. And, a few days later, at a mid-week game between the Reign and the Washington Spirit, Spirit owner Bill Lynch played the national anthem while the teams were still in the locker room simply to prevent her from kneeling again.
A week after that, Rapinoe knelt before a United States women national team game—a practice U.S. Soccer banned shortly thereafter.
In the other half of my life, the one I almost never talk about in this space, I am a United States history teacher. And one of the themes that I can’t get out of my head over the past few days is how much the push for change is built on the failures of those who make the first attempts.
In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the Seneca Falls Convention to discuss women’s rights and produced a document which argued for equality. However, that declaration also demanded that women be given the right to vote, something so radical for the time that the vast majority of attendees refused to sign the final product.
Still, this represented only the beginning of change. It pushed the boundary of equality forward and today, there is nothing controversial about women’s suffrage.
In the antebellum era, a newspaper man named William Lloyd Garrison did the same with abolitionism. Garrison was considered a radical in his time because he demanded the immediate emancipation of the slaves in an era when most abolitionists—who were still a minority of the population even in the North—favored a gradual and compensated emancipation.
Garrison even once publicly burned a copy of the Constitution, calling it a “covenant with death.” As a result of his actions, he repeatedly faced death threats, had his office vandalized on multiple occasions, and was even jailed one time simply to prevent a mob from lynching him.
But by pushing the acceptable boundary of speech, by being a radical of his time, Garrison pushed the fight for equality forward and today, there is nothing controversial about his fight for abolition.
It’s hard not to think of the 1960s protests and the police response to same as we watch events unfold in the United States this week.
In the 1960’s, the same thing happened in the Civil Rights Movement. A lot of this era has been whitewashed in history books, but even the peaceful protests were met with an extreme level of violence. German shepherds and fire hoses were used by the police and other public officials to attack protestors. Martin Luther King Jr.’s hotel in Birmingham was bombed, as was the 16th Street Baptist Church—killing four young Black girls. People threw food, spit at, and yelled at sit-in protestors. Freedom Riders coming in from the North were attacked, and one of their buses was even firebombed.
And still, the efforts of these de-segregationists and the images of those attacks on them helped pushed the boundary of equality forward, eventually leading to some of the most important civil rights laws passed in the country’s history.
Like a lot of Americans, I have struggled with what I have seen the past few days and weeks.
I’m sad. I’m angry. I’m confused.
But the one thing I can’t get out of my head is how much the boundary has been pushed over the past few years, especially because of the leadership of people like Kaepernick and the allies who later followed.
“It was a little nod to Kaepernick and everything that he’s standing for right now,” said Rapinoe that night in Chicago. “I think it’s actually pretty disgusting the way he was treated and the way that a lot of the media has covered it and made it about something that it absolutely isn’t. We need to have a more thoughtful, two-sided conversation about racial issues in this country.
“Being a gay American, I know what it means to look at the flag and not have it protect all of your liberties. It was something small that I could do and something that I plan to keep doing in the future and hopefully spark some meaningful conversation around it. It’s important to have white people stand in support of people of color on this. We don’t need to be the leading voice, of course, but standing in support of them is something that’s really powerful.”
Colin Kaepernick was vilified for what he did, facing an intense amount of outrage, hatred, abuse, and even revenge. He hasn’t played a single game in the National Football League since 2016.
Megan Rapinoe got to keep her career, and even become the hero of the 2019 World Cup-winning U.S. team, but also faced widespread and sometimes vile criticism for merely attempting to be an ally.
Today, what Kaepernick started and others followed doesn’t seem even close to radical. It just seems like step one, the beginning of a conversation.
And that in and of itself feels like a reflection of the boundary being moved once again.
John Halloran is a veteran Women’s Socccer journalist and championship winning soccer coach based in the Chicago area. His work has frequently appeared at The Yanks Are Coming, and he writes regularly at Equalizer Soccer, American Soccer Now. Before that, he founded the Bleacher Report’s soccer site American Touchline. He is a NWSL Media member and you can follow him on Twitter @johndhalloran.