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September 15, 2020

Mike Ditka again tells NFL players to ‘get the hell out’ of country after protests

[USA TODAY]

Mike Ditka spent five-plus decades around pro football. He’s a Hall of Famer and a Super Bowl champion. But when it comes to NFL players protesting police brutality and racial injustice during the national anthem, Ditka sounds like a broken record … of the stubbornly misinformed variety.

Back when Colin Kaepernick started his protest by kneeling during the anthem in 2016, Ditka said that Kaepernick should “get the hell out” of the country because Ditka saw the protests as disrespecting the flag.

Fast forward four years as the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked global protests against police brutality, and Ditka still hasn’t even tried to listen to the message of the protests.

He said in July that protesting athletes should “get the hell out” of the country. And after Week 1’s NFL games saw protests across the league, Ditka echoed the same catchphrase in an interview with Newsmax on Monday.

Ditka said:

“Football’s football. It’s not a complicated thing. You’re playing the game, you’re enjoying the game. You don’t like the game, get out of it. It’s not for protesting one way or the other. What color you are, what you think, this or that. You play football. That’s it. You’re privileged. You got a gift from God that you can play the game because you got a body you can do it with. I don’t really understand what you’re protesting. I played the game. I coached the game for a long time. It makes no sense to me.”

He continued:

“I would tell those players go to another country and play football there. You don’t have to come out. You don’t have to come out if you go to another country. You can’t! Because the game’s only played in this country. And if you can’t respect this country, get the hell out of it.”

BY ANDREW JOSEPH

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