San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick will be featured on the cover of GQ coming out August 20. The blossoming star talks about being underestimated, stereotyped and his mental toughness in the interview.
Below are a couple fascinating quotes from the piece.
Evidently, Kap keeps reliving the end of the Super Bowl in his head:
…on reliving his bad plays on-field: “All my life, I’ve had these flashbacks, these dreams, nightmares, daymares, like visions, where I relive certain plays,” he says. It’s never the highlight reel stuff. Just the junk. “Only the bad plays. I see them over and over, as if somebody’s rewinding a tape and forcing me to watch. Some of these are recent.” The three goal-line incompletions that preserved Baltimore’s slim lead as time dwindled in the Super Bowl play frequently and vividly. “But some of them go back to high school. Every time I relive these mistakes of mine, I’m also forced to ask, What could I have done different? What decisions could I have made? This stuff haunts me, but I like it, because it makes the game hard. And the more I study, the more comfortable I feel with what a defense is going to do.”
It sounds like Kap’s been dealing with some fairly heavy obstacles his entire life.
…on experiencing prejudice as a mixed-race boy adopted by two white parents: “On summer vacations, it happened every time,” Colin says. “We’d be checking into a motel and somebody would come up to me as I’m standing next to my family, all nervous, and say ‘Um, can I help you with something?’”
If racial profiling as a kid prepares you for anything, one would have to think it would be bouncing back from a devastating Super Bowl loss.
Below is preview footage which is posted on the GQ site.
Robert Griffin III will also be featured on another set of GQ covers due out the same day. The two quarterbacks could be on their way to Hall-of-Fame careers if they perform as they did during their first season as starting quarterbacks. Griffin set two regular season NFL rookie records for lowest percentage of passes intercepted and passer rating. Kaepernick broke the all-time record for most rushing yards by an NFL quarterback in one game with 181 yards against the Green Bay Packers in January.
Photo Credit: Ben Watts / GQ
Josh Helmuth is the editor for CraveOnline Sports. You can follow him on Twitter @JHelmuth or subscribe at Facebook.com/CraveOnlineSports for the latest in sports on your newsfeed.
