While Colin Kaepernick waits for a call that will -- or won’t -- ever come from the NFL, Kaepernick has -- or hasn’t -- written a check to Ice Cube’s BIG3 basketball league.
Shams Charania of TheAthletic.com reported overnight that Kaepernick has agreed to invest in the barnstorming 3-on-3 basketball league. Charania now reports, quoting an unnamed Kaepernick representative, that Charania’s first report was inaccurate.
The first report came from unnamed “sources close to” the BIG3 league. Kaepernick’s supposed investment was characterized as potentially saving the league. So with Kaepernick, per the unnamed representative, not investing in the league, an obvious question arises as to whether the league will indeed continue to survive.
The initial news was intriguing, because Ice Cube recently did a deal aimed at “enhanc[ing] the NFL’s dedication to increasing economic equity and partnerships with Black owned businesses.” If Kaepernick was separately doing business with Ice Cube, he could have become a go-between of sorts, helping to lay the foundation to bridge the five-year divide between player and league.
It remains to be seen where this goes from here. Charania sufficiently trusted the source close to the BIG3 to report that Kaepernick was in. He sufficiently trusts the unnamed Kaepernick representative that Kaepernick isn’t. There’s surely an interesting story as to how it came to be that a source close to the BIG3 persuaded Charania that Kaepernick is making an investment, since it would otherwise seem to be an incredibly random contention.