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Six years later, the Kaepernicks adopted Colin when he was an infant. When he was 4, the family moved to California's Central Valley, some two hours east of San Francisco, so Rick could take a job at Hilmar (which, by the way, is the largest single-site cheese processor on the planet).
Kaepernick has honored them by funding Camp Taylor. "I'm trying to word things correctly," he says, reflecting on Lance and Kent. "Because it's a very tragic situation. But at the same time, if that didn't happen, I wouldn't be in this situation. I mean, I do have a great deal of sympathy for what my parents have gone through, and a great deal of sorrow. You can't take that pain away. And I hope that the situation we're in now is something that can bring joy to them."
For the Kaepernicks, the family's odd mix--four white cheeseheads and a long, skinny black kid--is a source of amusement. At hotels, the family would check in together, then the clerk would turn to Colin and say, "Can I help you?" When Colin was playing at Nevada, Rick told a fan in the stands that his son was on the team. "Oh yeah? What's his number?" the guy asked. "Ten," Rick replied. The fan spotted Colin on the field, helmetless, and looked back at Rick. "What's his number again?"
Colin's two siblings followed Rick into the family business; they both work at Hilmar. Colin, a straight-A student in high school, thrived in sports. "He always said, 'I'm telling you, I'm not going into cheese,'" says Teresa. Colin never asked much about his birth parents except when it came to his athletic career. "I was just kind of curious about, O.K., I feel like I'm kind of tall, I can play sports pretty good, what did my parents do?" says Kaepernick. "Am I going to fit that mold where I might be able to play? That was about the extent of it."
Kaepernick's birth mother, Heidi Russo--now a nurse living outside Denver--is over 6 ft. tall. So that certainly helped. (The identity of his birth father is not publicly known.) At the time of Colin's birth, she was a 19-year-old single mother who didn't feel ready to raise a child. Russo and Kaepernick exchanged messages a few times while he was in college, but he cut it off. In February, Russo did an emotional interview with ESPN in which she described the day she gave Colin up. He wasn't happy about it. "My immediate reaction was like, 'Why?'" Kaepernick says. "The story had been told--we had gone over it. I had kind of let you know how I feel about it." He called Teresa, who had seen the interview. "I was like, 'Mom, look, I know who my family is. I know who my mother is. That's not going to change. I love you." Teresa broke down on the phone. "To me, that was the point where I felt like my mother was attacked," Kaepernick says. "That was the point where, in my mind, I was like [a meeting] is never going to happen. This won't happen because you went about it in such a way that you hurt my family, you hurt my mother. And that's not something I'm willing to tolerate." (Responds Russo: "I'm sorry that's the way he feels. I'm certainly not out here to hurt him or his family. But I am out here trying to change the stigmas and stereotypes associated with birth mothers.")