Listen, it used to be so much easier to be racist! But not so much these days, especially the truly mindless kind of racism that most people perform. Colorado’s NBC affiliate KOAA reports that the Prime Time Sports store is closing after 20 years in business. According to owner Stephen Martin, his decision to stop carrying Nike-branded merchandise hurt his business. He told the news station that “being a sports store without Nike is kind of like being a milk store without milk or a gas station without gas. How do you do it? They have a monopoly on jerseys.” That’s true, and that’s a bummer. I guess Nike used their monopoly to jack up their prices, and Martin couldn’t compete?
Nope. Martin pulled the merchandise because of the company’s support of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick was the first player to begin sitting, and then kneeling during the pregame playing of the national anthem, in protest of racial injustice in our country. Since that time, Kaepernick has had to sue the NFL for possibly colluding to end his professional sports career, as well as weather the strange move by right wingers to connect his peaceful and silent protest against racial injustice with disrespecting our military personnel and veterans.
Martin says that besides not selling Nike gear in his sporting goods store, he cancelled an autograph appearance by the NFL’s Brandon Marshall—because Marshall decided to kneel during the playing of the national anthem. Mr. Martin may have overestimated his support network of dumb, saying “As much as I hate to admit this, perhaps there are more Brandon Marshall and Colin Kaepernick supporters out there than I realized.”
Or maybe there are just less people that care about generating hate over a fabricated racist political football.