Colin Kaepernick could have had a very different dating history.
According to his new memoir, his mom once wanted him to shoot his shot at Taylor Swift.
Before Travis Kelce entered the picture, Kaepernick’s mother, Teresa, apparently had her own NFL-and-pop-star power-couple idea. And she was ready to play matchmaker.
Kaepernick revealed the surprising story in The Perilous Fight, his memoir released on September 15. He wrote that while he was playing in the NFL, his mother suggested that he ask Swift out because she believed they would be perfect together.
Kaepernick, however, was not exactly rushing to make the call.
“It was disappointing to me that my mother didn’t seem capable of seeing who I really was,” Kaepernick wrote in the book. “Years later, when I was in the NFL, she told me that I should ask out Taylor Swift (long before Travis Kelce made his move) because we would be perfect together.”
The civil rights activist added, “No slight to Taylor, but she was not my type.”
Meanwhile, Taylor Swift was just somewhere living her life, completely unaware that she was apparently been added to someone’s family dating strategy.
Kaepernick — who is biracial and identifies as a Black man — contrasted this anecdote with another memory of his mom being unsupportive of his high-school relationship with a Black classmate named Crystal. “I asked Crystal to the homecoming dance, a formal affair involving fancy gowns, tuxedoes and corsages. … When I got the official portrait from that night, featuring me and Crystal posed up in that classic, airbrushed frame, my mother hid it away in the back of a drawer,” he wrote.
And Kaepernick was not writing about the story just for laughs.
The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback used the moment to discuss something much deeper. In the memoir, he explains that he felt his white adoptive parents did not fully understand his identity as a Black person. He connected his mother’s suggestion about Swift to that larger feeling of being misunderstood.
That makes the story more complicated than a simple celebrity dating anecdote.
Kaepernick’s memoir covers far more serious parts of his life, including his upbringing, football career and his decision to protest racial injustice during the national anthem. But this unexpected Taylor Swift story has naturally grabbed attention because it is such an unusual piece of the book.
And somewhere, Travis Kelce might be looking at this story thinking one thing: “Thanks, Colin.”
