Colin Kaepernick’s new book includes a claim that, long before Taylor Swift became a fixture on NFL Sundays, his mother was already pushing him toward the pop superstar.
According to reporting from Page Six cited by Breitbart, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback writes that his adoptive mother, Tessa Kaepernick, urged him to ask Swift out during his playing days — roughly a decade before Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce got together.
‘We would be perfect together’
“When I was in the NFL, she told me that I should ask out Taylor Swift (long before Travis Kelce made his move) because we would be perfect together,” Kaepernick writes of his mother, as reported by Page Six.
The suggestion, according to the book, went nowhere. Kaepernick says he wasn’t interested, and he frames the rejection carefully — it wasn’t meant as a “slight to Taylor,” he writes. The singer simply was not his type.
Kaepernick appeared in the NFL from 2011 through 2016, spending his career with the 49ers. By the time Swift and Kelce began dating in 2023, his playing days were long behind him. The couple married in July of this year, which — if Kaepernick’s timeline is accurate — means his mother floated the idea at least a decade before Swift walked down the aisle with Kelce.
The anecdote is one of several Kaepernick uses in the book to examine his relationship with the woman who raised him. Not all of them are warm.
A prom photo and a drawer
Kaepernick also writes about a high school prom episode he describes as revealing. According to the account, his mother encouraged him to ask a white classmate named Lindsay to the dance. He went with a Black girl named Crystal instead.
He says his mother’s disappointment showed in what she did with the photographs.
“When I got the official portrait from that night, featuring me and Crystal posed up in that classic, airbrushed frame, my mother hid it away in the back of a drawer,” Kaepernick writes. “In her mind, Crystal was just a phase. Lindsay was the kind of girl I should want.”
He takes the episode, and the earlier suggestion about Swift, as evidence that Tessa Kaepernick was not “capable of seeing who [he] really is,” according to the book.
Kaepernick’s own romantic history cuts against the pattern he says his mother had in mind. In 2015, he began a relationship with Nessa Diab, a radio host and activist who was born in Egypt. The two have never publicly confirmed the year they married, though it appears to have been around 2020. Their first child arrived in 2022.
In the years since leaving the league, Kaepernick has become best known for kneeling during the national anthem in 2016, a protest that drew intense attention from both supporters and critics and that has overshadowed his football career in the public imagination.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/sports/2026/09/17/colin-kaepernick-claims-his-mom-urged-him-to-ask-taylor-swift-for-a-date-years-before-travis-kelce-not-my-type/