Colby Covington is stirring up trouble on social media again.
A couple of days ago, athletic brand Nike announced that they had signed up controversial football player Colin Kaepernick to a deal to front the 30th anniversary of their “Just Do It” campaign. The news got heavy media attention due to Kaepernick’s current status as a divisive figure and the fact that he is currently involved in a lawsuit against the NFL, claiming collusion to keep him from playing in the league.
This entire situation really had little to do with MMA, at least until UFC interim welterweight champion and noted troll Colby Covington got a hold of the news. Covington took to social media to skewer Nike and Kaepernick, calling him a “spineless sack of sh-t” and praising former NFL player Pat Tillman, who quit the NFL in 2002 to sign up for the American Armed Forces following the 9/11 attacks and lost his life in Afghanistan in 2004:
I grew up in Oregon and was around @Nike my whole life. It’s funny watching a company that uses child slave labor overseas to make their products all of a sudden become humanitarians. #PatTillman is an NFL/American Hero. @Kaepernick7 is just a spineless sack of shit. #NikeBoycott
— Colby Covington (@ColbyCovMMA) September 4, 2018
Kaepernick, the former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, is perhaps best known for starting the protest (initially sitting on the bench, then choosing to kneel, during the national anthem before NFL games) against the American flag in the NFL to bring attention to racial inequality, among other things. This has led to derision from many sources, including American president Donald Trump.
Covington, who recently took part in a White House visit to get a picture with Trump, is clearly just trying to stir up debate with his inflammatory comments. But the stuff about Tillman, who many believed should have been the Just Do It representative instead of Kaepernick, rings especially hollow in the wake of Tillman’s wife specifically asking everyone to not politicize her husband’s military service last year.
Yesterday, Nike released the first commercial featuring Kaepernick, which you can see here. Covington is not currently scheduled to fight and will likely be stripped of his interim title after electing not to fight full champion Tyron Woodley at UFC 228. That bout went to Darren Till instead.