COLIN Kaepernick's best sport is actually baseball, but that's one of the least surprising things to be learned from Colin in Black and White, the just-released Netflix 'limited series' that tells the story of his early years.

He was pretty good at basketball too, but it was American football that was his passion and that eventually became his career.

But five years after he took the knee during the US national anthem before a game, to protest racial injustice, it's not his sporting abilities for which Colin Kaepernick will be remembered.

That's why this series is compelling viewing for anyone, not just sports fans (before hearing his account of the role and importance of quarterbacks, I didn't have a clue what they did or why they mattered).

Kaepernick's team, the San Francisco 49ers, let him go after the 2016 season, apparently for political rather than sporting reasons. Since then, he's been trying to get back into the game (which some see as a problematic move in some respects, in light of what he says in this series). He still trains for five or six days a week, in preparation for the call.

But most of his time and energy goes into activism, and now he's teamed up with leading director Ava Du Vernay (best known for Selma and When They See Us) on this series, a mix of drama and documentary - or polemic. So it gets two bites at the cherry, very different, but both worth seeing.

It opens with a close-up of that solemn Old-Testament-prophet face, framed by what has become his trademark cloud of an Afro, its vast softness contrasting with his bony features (Kaepernick often looks much older than his 34 years), as he speaks directly into the camera.

He does this many times: he has the conviction and charisma to keep you watching as he sits on a concrete bench or paces around a bare grey room. The dramatised scenes are sometimes projected on the back wall. Characters from the drama walk into the room, or he walks into their scene, breaking the 'fourth wall' of theatre tradition. This technique makes for a staccato mix of episodes from his youth, historical vignettes and lectures from the adult Kaepernick, but it works.

For one thing, it shows how far he's come. The teenage Colin, engagingly played by Jaden Michael, lives in California with his white adoptive parents (Mary-Louise Parker and Nick Offerman), who back his sporting ambitions, but who by today's standards are startlingly blind to the issues raised by a mixed-race adoption.

So is the young Colin. He's protected by the middle-class privilege his parents bestow on him, but unlike them, he experiences countless racial microaggressions, a word and a concept he didn't understand then and which his parents simply did not see. When they drive him all over California to baseball games, there's no problem; when Colin drives, he gets pulled over by a suspicious, jumpy cop. Coaches put him through harsher tests than other players ('Why am I always the one who has to prove them wrong?' he w