Taking a Knee

I can’t stop thinking about Marquise Goodwin.

It’s three in the morning and I need to be sleeping, but I’m up, and I’m thinking about Marquise Goodwin, wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers. Marquise Goodwin, Olympic long jumper. Marquise Goodwin, American. Marquise Goodwin, father.

The Niners trounced the increasingly pathetic New York Giants yesterday afternoon, and Goodwin — the newly-crowned WR1 in Santa Clara, following Pierre Garcon’s recent move to IR — busted Janoris Jenkins in the open field for an 83-yard touchdown bomb from rookie quarterback C.J. Beathard.

His team won their first game of the season — and it was one of the worst days of Marquise Goodwin’s life.

After the game, Goodwin took to social media to share that he and his wife, Morgan, had lost their unborn baby boy, and had to prematurely deliver him that morning. Sunday morning. Nine or so hours before he was scheduled to take the field at Levi Stadium and face down the Giants in a quest for the Niners’ first victory.

The Instagram picture is hard to look at, a too-tiny hand holding onto his father’s index finger. In the caption, Goodwin thanks God for his “courageous and resilient” wife.

“The pain (physically, mentally, & emotionally) that she has endured is unbelievable,” he writes. “Please Pray for the Goodwin family.”

The wideout took the field on Sunday without anyone knowing the loss he had suffered, save for likely some 49ers personnel and players. If the news was out there, no doubt it would have gotten around. The media would have loved to make a “Brett Favre’s dad” out of Goodwin’s long touchdown, and the team’s improbable victory.

And lord, that touchdown. I’ve watched it maybe 30 times.

Beathard’s got all the time in the world for the throw, which gives Goodwin — a track star at the University of Texas before his turn on the 2012 U.S. Olympic Team — plenty of time to get downfield, just a half step ahead of Jenkins. Giants fans on Twitter are accusing the corner of quitting on the play, but I can’t see how there would be any stopping Goodwin, who shakes him off and bolts down the rest of an open field.

He blows a kiss to the sky as he crosses the goal line and drops to his knees. He crosses himself, cradles the football in his left arm — in the same fingers that held his son’s hand just hours earlier — and then, overcome, he falls forward, burying his head in the turf.

Teammates in red and gold swarm him as the scoreboard registers a rare lead for the home squad. The telecast cuts to Jenkins giving the “my bad” sign to his teammates for blowing the tackle. Cheerleaders cheer. And when the shot comes back, Goodwin is still face down in the end zone.

The game moves on eventually, of course. The Niners pick him up, both literally and figuratively, and they muscle out the win. Later on in the day, the world finds out the meaning behind Goodwin’s heartbreaking celebration, if you can call it that. His coach, Kyle Shanahan, will say later that his number one receiver was “adamant” about playing though the pain. Support floods in fast and loud, social media prayers from fans and rivals alike, a choice spot on SportsCenter for Goodwin’s highlight reel-worthy score.

But here’s the other thing about Sunday’s game: That touchdown wasn’t the first time Marquise Goodwin took a knee that day.

In the digital age, the easiest way to know someone is to look closely at who they’re telling you they are.

Marquise Goodwin’s Instagram account is mostly football. Game shots, highlight clips, pics of the now seemingly mandatory post-game jersey swaps. Sprinkled in are the posts that tell you more about him. Flashy fashion posts. Group shots with friends. Effusive and heartfelt tributes to his wife — whom he met when the two were both track and field All-Americans at UT — including a birthday post where he is literally placing a crown on her head: “PS: she wanted a photo shoot so I got her a damn photo shoot!”

There’s the heartbreaking photograph of his son that they used for the announcement. Only the boy’s tiny hand and torso are visible in the shot, but Morgan told People on Monday that the couple’s son “looked exactly like his daddy.”

There are pictures of him and his sister, Deja, who has cerebral palsy. Born 10 months before his younger sibling, Goodwin admits in a recent birthday post that “the doctors didn’t give my sis many weeks to live.”

“BUT God had different plans; and because of his grace & mercy, today we get to celebrate 26 years of life for my sister,” he continues. “Happy Born-day sis. 💚 I love you.” Another series of shots shows the pair on the NFL sidelines, Deja smiling up at her brother, who’s decked out for game day.

There are also photographs of him kneeling for the anthem with his teammates this season — paired with Isaiah 1:17, “Learn to do good, seek justice, correct oppression” — and a birthday shoutout to former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who may be the NFL’s most influential player, despite the fact that he doesn’t suit up on Sundays.

This Sunday, a few hours before the tragic news broke, NFL fans on Twitter weren’t pouring out support and prayers for Goodwin. They were calling him, among other things, a “creep,” a “loser,” and a “piece of shit.”

Whether due to some shift in the collective consciousness or just an innate desire to self-present as much righteousness as possible in an increasingly visible world, it is rapidly becoming more and more difficult to be a proud, socially conscious fan of the NFL.

There’s the undeniable injury risk and increasingly clear evidence on the lasting damages of head trauma. There’s the bungling of domestic violences cases, specifically this season, to the point where the public has passed the point of caring whether or not star Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott did what he’s accused of. The implications of that case moving forward — and the thought of the burden of proof which will now rest on each subsequent accuser — makes me shudder.

And then there’s the inexplicably large number of NFL fans who somehow think that a group of players silently protesting during the playing of the National Anthem before a sporting event is somehow offensive to the armed services, despite countless members of the armed services saying publicly that the right to protest is one of the reasons they signed up to defend their country in the first place. These people who speak out against the “kneelers” are, at best, ignorant — and very few of them are at their best. At their worst, they’re a seething cesspool of racist bile.

The storm of Twitter fury seems to have waned as the weeks of the NFL season tick on, perhaps those people are really just following through on their proposed boycotts. Every now and then, however— like when reading this Politico piece on a desolate Pennsylvania mining town whose residents are clinging fast to the president’s campaign promises, but most incensed by the “disrespect” they see in the NFL — I’ll be reminded that, for more than a few people in this country, watching a group of men kneel during a song is more offensive than the systemic and lethal injustices those men are protesting.

I don’t know how football moves forward from this season, from this moment. I truly don’t know what the answer is as a fan, how to reconcile the love of this sport with the increasingly-crushing weight of its issues. I don’t know how we evolve past an atmosphere that keeps growing more toxic and volatile, while still protecting a game that gives so much to so many.

But I do know one thing, and that is this: If you care about Marquise Goodwin when he kneels in the end zone, then you damn sure have to care about Marquise Goodwin when he kneels on the sideline.