Michigan State's Tom Izzo has new view of Colin Kaepernick protest: 'How ignorant am I?'

Tom Izzo’s opinion of Colin Kaepernick’s protest has flipped in the past four years.

Michigan State basketball’s Hall of Fame coach said Tuesday on WXYT-FM (97.1) that he made it a point to talk to his players last week about his change in opinion over Kaepernick’s kneeling protest against police brutality and juxtaposed it with things he saw as a kid during the Woodstock era.

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"Listen, I learn lessons, too. And I’m still learning at this age," Izzo told "The Jamie and Stoney Show." "I said to my team — I had a lot of Zoom calls, and then when we got ’em here, I met with them outside, legal or illegal, because I thought I had an obligation to talk to them. I had talked to some of our former players, from Cleaves to Smith to Kelser and Magic, and all the guys before. and I did talk to all those people to try and get a good feel.

“And what I realized is I wasn’t real happy with the Colin Kaepernick thing when it happened. I guess like a lot of people I looked at it as, what are we doing? The flag, all this stuff. And yet, as I look back on it, how ignorant am I? Because that was a peaceful protest.”

Izzo said his reassessment began when he recently saw old pictures of flag burnings from the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he and assistant coach, future Northern Michigan teammate and current assistant coach Mike Garland, were growing up. That still bothers him, he said, but the current protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd helped him re-evaluate the Kaepernick protest.

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“There were a lot of white people (in the photos), and they weren’t kneeling at the flag, they were burning it. And that really hit home for me,” he said. “I said, 'I am into all the peaceful protests. I'm not into the burning. But I’m also trying to figure out how many times you have to try to get something done.’

“And yet, if there’s a silver (lining) in this some way, I’ve never seen so many white people, black people, Hispanic people marching together in the peaceful protests. And to me, that is progress that I don’t hope will continue, it has to continue.”

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Izzo called the killing of Floyd in Minneapolis over Memorial Day weekend “disgusting.”

“I feel I spend a lot of time in the inner cities and around different people, and always felt like I had a good relationship,” he said. “But when I saw what I saw with George Floyd, it sickened me — I said it, and it did, and it was real. And it was disappointing, but it was disgusting. None of us know all the things that happen, but a human life is a human life. And we’re treating it like it’s nothing. there are some issues.

“But as Jud Heathcote, my old boss, used to say, 'There’s bad everything.' I mean we’ve learned that society’s got bad people as police officers, they have bad people as presidents, they have bad people as teachers, administrators. Hell, we’ve learned that there’s bad clergy. Whoever thought we'd be in a day when we’re questioning priests? And we are. But this is human life.”

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Taking on racial inequality is nothing new for Izzo. Before the 2017-18 season, with Kaepernick sparking protests and discussion, the Spartans started wearing black warmup shirts with “We talk, we listen” on the front as a way to openly talk about social injustice and divisiveness in America, which Izzo said he was “sick of.” He felt it was important to have a unified approach to showing support for each other and those pushing for understanding.

Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @chrissolari. Read more on the Michigan State Spartans and sign up for our Spartans newsletter.