Doyel: Colts players explain why they are kneeling for the national anthem

Gregg Doyel
IndyStar
  • Colts at Seahawks, 8:30 p.m. Sunday, NBC
Several Indianapolis Colts players kneel as others stand with arms locked during the national anthem before the start of their game against the Cleveland Browns at Lucas Oil Stadium Sunday, Sept. 24 2017.

INDIANAPOLIS – Darius Butler knelt Sunday before the Indianapolis Colts played the Cleveland Browns. He knelt during the national anthem and he heard the sounds coming from the stands, ominous and angry noise as the Lucas Oil Stadium crowd of 63,351 saw what was happening on both sidelines. Players from the Browns were kneeling, more than a dozen. Ten or more Colts were kneeling. Thousands were booing.

For the crowd, the booing came fast and it came easy. We’re all dug in on this topic, a topic that was bubbling beneath the surface until President Donald Trump took that flamethrower mouth of his and spoke ugly words about NFL players who would dare kneel during the anthem.

Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. He’s fired!

Darius Butler was born on a U.S. military base in Frankfurt, Germany. His father spent 11 years in the U.S. Army, reaching the rank of staff sergeant. His brother served in the Army, too.

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No, this decision wasn’t easy for Butler. He thought about it for more than a day before making up his mind Saturday night. He was going to kneel Sunday. That’s what he was going to do, and …

Well, hang on. Maybe not. No, matter of fact, that’s not what he’s going to do. He’s going to stand. His father served. His brother. He was going to support any of his Colts teammates who knelt, maybe with a hand on one of their shoulders, but he’d stay up on his …

No, no, no. What about those comments from President Trump on Friday? Ugly comments, disrespectful, urging NFL owners to fire anyone who isn’t standing for the anthem. Here we are — land of the free, home of the brave, our political speech protected by the First Amendment — and the U.S. president is silencing dissent?

No. He’s going to kneel. That’s what Butler decided, hours later, as Saturday turned into Sunday and he got out of bed and woke to a phone full of messages from friends and family. The people who know Darius Butler best, they know what he was going through. He’s 31 years old, thoughtful and intelligent and kind. For five years he has gone to Jamaica every offseason to help teach underprivileged kids there the game of football. He has gone to Jamaica for basketball camps as well. A few years back he decided to do something for underprivileged kids in his native South Florida, so he started a football camp there.

Family and friends, they know Butler. They knew he’d be struggling. Kneel, don’t kneel, we love you no matter what. That’s what those messages on his phone said.

Butler decided to kneel, joining nearly half the Colts' starting defense on Sunday as well as hundreds of players from NFL teams across America and even the two playing Sunday in London, because Donald Trump wasn’t going to scare anyone off. Matter of fact, Butler was saying after the Colts’ 31-28 victory on Sunday, Trump is the reason for this outpouring of wordless social speech.

“It upset a lot of guys,” Butler said. “It kind of radicalizes you, in a sense: ‘OK this line is being drawn in the sand. I need to do something to show exactly what side I’m on.’”

Everyone has a reason for their decision, whatever that decision is: Kneel, as Darius Butler did, or don’t kneel as most of his teammates chose. Boo, as thousands of fans in Indianapolis decided on Sunday, or don’t. Get on Twitter or Facebook or email and write words of love — or hate. Show empathy.

Or not.

The national anthem is playing, but nobody’s listening. It’s easier being angry. It’s easier being offended. It’s easier lugging whatever baggage each of us is carrying into this story and unpacking it and making ourselves at home on our side of the line President Trump so graphically carved into the Alabama dirt. And we all have baggage. Don’t say: I’m not biased. Of course you are.

Of course I am.

My father moved our family to Oxford, Miss., in 1978. I was 7. He taught law school at Ole Miss, and that summer he signed me up for the baseball league where the other law professors sent their sons, a league run by one of the service groups in towns. It wasn’t until the first game that my dad realized: This league was segregated.

No black kids allowed.

Me, I didn’t know. I played that summer, had a good old time, but the next summer Dad signed me up for the city league. He urged other law professors to do the same. And my dad, a really fun guy who coached me that first summer, asked all the kids on our team to come to the city league with us. Most did. They loved my dad.

The segregated league folded.

That’s one of the places life took me. Rashaan Melvin? Life took him to Waukegan, Ill., a blue-collar suburb of Chicago. I grew up playing baseball. Melvin grew up dodging drugs and gangs in an area where the incarceration rate was ten times higher for minorities. One of his brothers didn’t dodge so good, and went to jail. So did another brother. Melvin turned to his father, his role model, a single dad working and going to church and raising seven kids. Rashaan said: I’m going to be like him.

Rashaan’s dad died two years ago. Prostate cancer.

Melvin knelt on Sunday. Like Darius Butler, he says his choice had nothing to do with disrespecting the military. For Rashaan Melvin, the war is right here at home, on civilian turf like Waukegan, Ill.

“It’s much bigger than a flag — we all know that,” Melvin said. “It’s what’s right and what’s wrong. We all felt what’s happening and what was said (by Trump) was wrong, and we all wanted to take a stand. What’s right and what’s wrong — and not just to people but in the eyes of God.

“We’re all supposed to work together. We’re supposed to look out for each other as people. If you go back to the Bible, we’re supposed to care for our neighbors. We’ll never get anywhere as a people if we don’t do that. We’ll be stuck in a hole.”

Stick to sports? Trump said what he said on Friday about kneeling in the NFL, then rescinded a White House invitation to the NBA champion Golden State Warriors after Stephen Curry hurt his feelings, and now this is the biggest story in America. Sad, really, given that we seem to be as close to nuclear war as we’ve been since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. North Korea is saying threatening things about the United States. Trump is saying threatening things in response. As a country, we should be united over our need to avoid a war that could ruin planet Earth as we know it.

Instead, we’re divided over this: Players all over the NFL are kneeling, or in some cases simply avoiding the issue by staying in the locker room for the anthem. Fans in Indianapolis are booing, their rage prompting Browns running back Duke Johnson to lift his arms in response, egging them on, asking them to bring it.

Nobody is listening. You have your story. Butler and Melvin have theirs. I have mine. Like Butler, I was born on a military base, near Pearl Harbor. My dad, an officer in the Navy, was in Vietnam when I was born. Five of my uncles fought in Korea or Vietnam or both, and not all of them came back whole. Loving this country, loving the military and being appalled at the divisive language spoken by our president are not mutually exclusive positions. I know this firsthand. So does Darius Butler, who can say it more eloquently than I can:

“Nobody’s protesting the flag or the anthem,” Butler said, seven words I’m going to ask you to read again.

Nobody’s protesting the flag or the anthem.

“All of us have great respect for the military, great respect for the flag,” Butler said. “All of us have family who were military members, some who died, but it’s protesting things that are wrong in this country, that need to be fixed. We need to come together as one and as a whole country. We respect the military, police.”

So why, someone asked Butler, kneel?

 

“The comments made by Trump earlier in the week had some guys stirred up,” he said. “For some guys, and me personally, it kind of drew a line in the sand to where I just wanted to be clear which side I’m on. There are a lot of great things about this country, and this is a great country, but there are a lot of things that need to change, and need to be addressed.”

But it’s easier to boo, Darius. Listening is hard. Thinking is harder. And empathy? Well, for some, empathy is simply impossible.

But not for Rashaan Melvin. He heard the crowd booing him and everyone else who knelt Sunday. He prayed for them, he said, right there during the anthem. And then he went out and had the game of his life, recording his first career interception in his fifth year in the league, and then picking off another pass. With that second interception, Melvin took the ball to the sideline and looked up into the crowd. He saw a sea of faces, most of them white, cheering for him. He pointed about 25 rows up, and in a show of grace and generosity he threw the football into a mass of strangers.

What lucky fan took home Rashaan Melvin’s football? No idea, but I like to think it was someone who was booing him three hours earlier. Maybe, after a day like Sunday, that person will see the world a little differently.

A fantasy, I know. Let me have it. Just for today.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar or at facebook.com/gregg.doyel.