I can only think of -- right off the top of my head -- Pat Tillman's another guy who did something similar, and we regard him as a hero. So I'd assume that hero status will be stamped with Kaepernick as well.
I think it would be accurate to say that Kaepernick has attained the status of a hero among certain segments of the population who view the American flag no differently than the Confederate one.
But Kaepernick is no Pat Tillman who voluntarily gave up a multi-million dollar contract to enlist in the U.S. Army and was killed on the battlefield. While Kaepernick got blackballed from the NFL for kneeling during the Star Spangled Banner last I checked he is alive, well and scrimping by on a multi-million dollar contract from Nike. If Kaepernick had really wanted to play football he could have done so with the CFL, but was totally uninterested in playing in Canada.
Pat Tillman sacrificed his life for this country, a sacrifice all the more sadder because he was killed by friendly fire. Colin Kaepernick has sacrificed absolutely nothing.
Not only is Kaepernick no Pat Tillman, he isn't even in Curt Flood's class. Fifty years ago, Flood rejected a trade from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies and gave up his career to challenge MLB's reserve clause all the way to the Supreme Court. He would lose, but a few short years later the reserve clause was smashed by free agency - a decision which has benefited athletes in all professional sports.
Brett Favre is entitled to view Colin Kaepernick as a hero if he wishes and so is anyone else. In which case, Favre and a lot of other people have a very loose definition of what constitutes a hero.
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