Petite Android

Every football player has their own celebration after a touchdown. They can be as subdued as a fist pump or a salsa dance or as grandiose as sexual thrusting at the sky, humping nothing in particular, just the general concept of sports and heaven. But one has always puzzled me: when Colin Kaepernick, quarterback of the San Francisco 49s scores a touchdown, he hunches over and kisses his bicep.

Now, anyone who has taken even an introductory course to kinesiology knows that the major muscles in the upper body of every human can be broken down into two groups: pushing muscles or pulling muscles, and it’s the former that are the stars of football. The triceps, the chest, the abdominals and the shoulders are the most useful muscles to a quarterback. Throwing a football requires strong deltoids for the wind up, strong triceps for power in the follow-through, powerful lats for stabilization and a solid core because so much of the throw comes from the hips. Even running and shedding defenders takes a tremendous amount of pectoral strength and churning leg power, all responsible for getting Colin Kapernick into the end zone one way or another. In fact, the only muscle group that doesn’t have to do a goddamn thing is the bicep. It just sits there and lets the rest of the body carry it to victory. So it’s a reasonable question to ask: Why does Colin Kaepernick kiss his bicep?

The easiest answer is obviously: convenience. The proximity and accessibility between bicep and lips is unequaled by any other major muscle group. The bicep, after all, is the representation of strength and so by kissing the bicep, even though it’s little more than a figurehead muscle, metaphorically suggests he is kissing his own strength and power. But now we are faced with a much bigger question: Why is a tiny muscle group like the bicep synonymous with power? Arm and Hammer, the “We Can Do It!” lady, even children when they flex instinctually offer up the bicep. It is the spokesman for human strength, and I think the answer goes back to that first kinesiology lesson.

The bicep is a purely pulling muscle which simply means that we use it to get closer to an object rather than push it away. Human strength is not instinctually measured by pushing people down but in pulling them up. Strength isn’t about striking at others but in holding them close. Strength has less to do with the individual’s power and considerably more to do with how that individual uses that power to connect and help.

With that in mind, Colin Kaepernick isn’t just kissing the one muscle with the day off, or even narcissistically congratulating himself on his really great body, he is honoring his connection to the people around him, to his team and his fans and his commitment to do whatever he can to lift them up.