Baller Alert got the opportunity to speak with Denver Broncos linebacker Brandon Marshall to discuss some of the issues he has faced since since deciding to take a knee during the National Anthem.
You may recall, Marshall decided to take a knee during the National Anthem during the NFL’s Week 1, following in the footsteps of his former college teammate Colin Kaepernick. That same week, Marshall lost two endorsements.
“Honestly, [when I lost those endorsements], I wasn’t really worried about it,” he tells Baller Alert. “If they didn’t want to back me and what I believed in, then they weren’t the companies for me. I lost some endorsements but there will be more that will come. They already paid me most of the money anyway so I wasn’t really tripping.”
Brandon Marshall did not only sit during the National Anthem, he took time to meet with local officials to come up with a resolution. In November, Marshall announced that after nine weeks and several meetings with the Denver Police Department about its use of force policy, he was calling off his protest.
“When I stood back up again after I spoke to the chief of police and they decided to review and change their policies, people said ‘oh, he stood up because he lost his endorsements.’ I stood up after nine weeks. I lost my endorsements after the first game. That had nothing to do with me standing up at all,” said Marshall.
A month after calling off his protest, an extremely racist and threatening letter was mailed to the Denver Broncos practice facility. Marshall posted the letter on Instagram to reiterate why he decided to sit out the National Anthem in the first place.
“I received a letter calling me all kinds of n-words and racial slurs, threats and stuff like that,” the linebacker tells us. “I wanted to expose it because I wanted to let it be known that this stuff still exists. Some people are blind, saying that because we have a black president there’s no racism. That’s absurd. The people who believe [racism] doesn’t exist anymore, they’re naive, they haven’t grown up in that type of environment or they don’t know what it’s like to be a minority.”
In a switch of gears, we also discussed Aqib Talib’s recent comments about Harry Douglas, following Douglas’ dirty play on Chris Harris. In a nutshell Brandon Marshall says Aqib is “about that life,” and even though he probably shouldn’t have said what he said in public, he definitely means it.
Listen to the entire interview below.
