When we talk about the NFL and American protests, all eyes today focus on former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. But Kaepernick is not the first professional football player to call attention to national issues. He follows in the footsteps of St. Louis Cardinals’ linebacker Dave Meggyesy, who protested the policies of the Nixon administration in the 1960s. Meggyesy’s protests have been largely forgotten, but they left a formidable legacy: when Nixon’s people used him to symbolize their opponents, they linked the game of football to a particular political ideology. All these years later, that linkage has helped to turn Kaepernick’s respectful protest about a specific issue into a national political… football.

In August 2016, after consulting with a former Green Beret to choose a gesture that insulted neither veterans nor the military, Kaepernick knelt during the National Anthem to protest racism and police violence. Fellow players joined him and formed a coalition to draw attention to “the way that people of color and poor people in this country have been treated throughout history.” Deliberately ignoring those express intentions, in the fall of 2017 Donald Trump demanded that NFL team owners fire “sons of bitches” who “disrespected the flag.” From Trump’s perspective, attacking Kaepernick and his supporters ginned up useful resentment among white voters who cheered African-American athletes on the field but grew enraged when those players dared to speak as engaged political actors. Trump has since repeatedly invoked racially-loaded notions that athletes should be seen but not heard, suggesting that anyone exercising his First Amendment rights this way “shouldn’t be in the country,” disinviting the SuperBowl champion Philadelphia Eagles from the customary White House visit, and mocking LeBron James’s intelligence. White House media advisor Gina Loudon told media personality Lou Dobbs that athletes should “shut up and play ball.”

Fifty years ago, white Cardinals linebacker Dave Meggyesy tried to spur a similar national conversation about the direction of the country by protesting during the anthem, but his protest went nowhere. Indeed, before he quit football and wrote a best-selling autobiography, Meggyesy’s name would have been familiar to only the most devoted fans. An outstanding special-teams player, by 1969 he was contending for a starting spot at outside linebacker. But his politics grew increasingly radical, and increasingly vocal, throughout the 1960s. In 1966, he paid for buses to transport demonstrators to a peace march in Washington. During training camp in the late summer of 1969, he agitated against being served grapes picked by non-union labor. That September, he convinced thirty-seven teammates to sign a petition calling on the United States to withdraw from Vietnam, the public release of which so agitated Cardinals management that it forced him to apologize publicly to the team.

Then, in October, in solidarity with the raised fists of black-gloved Olympic sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos the year before, Meggysey refused an NFL mandate that players hold their helmets in their left hands and salute the flag during the National Anthem. Though his protest continued for two months, it attracted only brief media attention. The night after his initial gesture, incensed callers swamped a popular local radio show. “You goddamn commie, why don’t you go to Hanoi?” someone yelled from the stands. At the team’s last home game, disgruntled fans held up a sign accusing the Cardinals of “Think[ing] Pink.”

Not a single reporter for the national press reported Meggyesy’s protest. After its momentary spurt of indignation, local media covered only the late-season injury that cost him his starting spot. Nor did friendly reporters find the protest compelling. When Meggyesy spoke to the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Sandy Padwe a month later, he did not press the point, lambasting football as “a game for yahoos” played by “psychos” but never mentioning the anthem. The New York Times’s Robert Lipsyte, the national columnist most sympathetic to radical athletes, profiled Meggyesy the next spring without discussing the anthem. For most fans, Meggyesy represented the least of the team’s problems. A columnist for the Alton Evening Telegraph simply listed “Think Pink” without comment alongside numerous signs he saw at Busch Stadium in late November lamenting the Cardinals’ mediocrity.

As he was well aware, Meggyesy’s race helped to shield him from official attention. He knew that his protests did not press the racial triggers that Olympians Smith and Carlos had. He told an interviewer from Students for a Democratic Society that “black athletes have 100 times as much to lose as I have.” The Nixon administration was using coded appeals to racism, via its notorious “Southern Strategy,” just then to peel white Southerners away from their longtime home in the Democratic Party. Under those circumstances, attacking a white player paid no culture-war dividends.

Everything changed when Meggyesy made national news after his retirement in May 1970 by writing Out of Their League, which denounced professional football for creating “the most repressive regime in our history…ruled by [Richard Nixon,] a football freak.” He hoped Americans would reject football’s values and football’s president and build a culture centered on something less toxic than violence. Selling more than 600,000 copies in paperback, the book won Meggyesy a lectureship at Stanford and speaking engagements at more than 100 campuses. He hit the talk shows, hosted a radio show on Berkeley’s radical KPFA, and chatted up newspaper columnists. At year’s end, the Boston Globe named him one of the “Movers of the Year” for “speaking for a new type of athlete.”

Speaking out at length and in detail against so hallowed an institution as the NFL prompted many to dismiss Meggyesy as un-American. Players and coaches blasted him as a quitter, a loser, and, in the words of his former coach, “just a hippie.” These terms proved useful in the Nixon administration’s cultural politics, which aimed to attract Middle Americans appalled by youth, long hair, and disrespect for tradition. Meggyesy checked all these boxes. In 1971, Vice-President Spiro Agnew deliberately set out to polarize the American electorate in order to attract new voters, and Meggyesy provided a useful target.  Agnew lambasted him in the pages of Sports Illustrated that summer and again the next spring as a “professional malcontent” who detested “the values which the overwhelming majority of Americans hold dear.” According to one outraged Texas journalist, only a step or two separated quitting football from setting up your rifle above Dealey Plaza: “the real cause for alarm is those people who say to hell with ANY ‘society,’ I’m gonna do exactly what I want to do, whether it be breaking a window or getting a coach fired or assassinating a President.”

That rhetoric worked. Though the fact that Meggesy remained in-demand as a speaker suggested that his values did not, in fact, run counter to those of America at large, the Nixon administration had managed to use him to link football to a certain political ideology. Colin Kaepernick, whose heritage had already put him on the losing side of that political ideology, has inherited that history as well.