"Totally worth it"

From the satirical Babylon Bee:

BEAVERTON, OR—All upper management personnel and top executives at Nike's headquarters have, sadly, passed away after they voluntarily stopped breathing.

They did this because Colin Kaepernick called their offices in a rage once he discovered they were breathing since racists in the 18th century also breathed.

"I thought we understood one another," Kaepernick said before quoting Frederick Douglass out of context in a passioned speech to the entire Nike board. "But then I heard you guys were still breathing. I thought you were better than that. You know who else breathed? Racists like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Benjamin Franklin."

"Honestly, if you want me to endorse your brand the next time I play a pickup game of football at the local park, you're gonna need to cancel your breathing." One exec attempted to protest, but Kaepernick wasn't having it. "I said your breathing is CANCELLED."

Realizing they had very little choice, the whole Nike leadership team saluted one another, held their noses, passed out, and died.

"Totally worth it," one exec said before the blackness took him.

The way it works

Nike hypocrisy

Andreas Vou writes in Spiked,

...Recent comments made by another sports star, Turkish NBA player Enes Kanter, have exposed Nike’s lack of principle.

In the summer of 2016, around the same time as Kaepernick began his protests, an attempted coup against the Turkish government sparked a crackdown on dissenting voices by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Kanter is a longtime critic of the regime and a supporter of US-based Fetullah Gulen, who Erdogan blamed for the coup. And so he became a target.

The New York Knicks player had his Turkish passport revoked, and Erdogan issued a warrant for his arrest. Kanter’s father even had to disown him in a bid to safeguard their family.

Despite playing for a popular NBA team, the 26-year-old cannot find a sponsor. This is because, he says, sportswear companies are wary of damaging their commercial prospects in Turkey. And in an interview with Vice Sports last month, he singled out (you guessed it) Nike as one of those companies:

‘I talked to Nike and they said “we want to give Enes a contract, but if we give him one [the Turkish government] will shut down every store in Turkey, so we cannot”… I’m an NBA player with no shoe deal. No endorsement deal. And I play in New York!’

It seems that Kanter sacrificed everything for something he believed in, and yet Nike was nowhere to be found.

The decision to sign Kaepernick obviously had nothing to do with his sporting profile. He has not played in the NFL since 2016, as he has been unable to find a new team. And yet he was given a contract with Nike that was said to be on par with top-end NFL players.

Kanter, on the other hand, is in the prime of his sporting career, making millions pursuing his passion. What’s more, his decision to put everything on the line to continue speaking out against the Turkish regime, which has detained over 170,000 of his fellow citizens in recent years, showed precisely the kind of bravery Nike is claiming to champion.

Read more here.