The National Football League offseason continues to be the season of putting a fine point on things.
The league, which has re-defined the legal body positions for players during a pass reception or a tackle, has also codified the legal position for players during the national anthem: upright.
In an effort to win back fans who tuned out in disgust last year over players’ sitting down during “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the league has mandated that all players stand for the pre-game song, or stay in the locker room until the song is over.
There was already an unofficial policy in place, of course, which was to take note of who’s protesting, ostracize them and refuse to sign them after their contracts expire. Two players have filed grievance lawsuits against the league alleging collusion. Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49er who started the movement two years ago, was first joined by former teammate Eric Reid in the sit-down protests, and now in the lawsuit.
The 30-year-old Kaepernick quarterbacked the 49ers to the Super Bowl six years ago. Reid, a Pro Bowl safety in his rookie 2013 season, is 26. Neither player has a contract today. It’s pretty clear what is happening in the wake of their protests, but proving in court that 32 teams all colluded to keep Kaepernick and Reid out of the league is another matter.
The whole tradition of playing the national anthem before sports events was said to have emerged from some degree of patriotic guilt.
In the pre-Jumbotron era of the early 20th Century, live bands were on hand at ball games to spruce up the proceedings between innings. At the 1918 World Series, with the U.S. in World War I, the seventh-inning stretch got an unscripted revision when the band broke into a version of the national anthem.
The surprised fans chimed in and sang along enthusiastically. The players, of whom it had been hinted should have been fighting a war instead of playing baseball, also seized the moment to show their red, white and blue bona fides, and sang their hearts out.
Not to be outdone in the patriotism department, the Boston Red Sox began singing the anthem at every game, and before long every team was doing the same.
In the mid-1950s, the Baltimore Orioles suspended the playing of the anthem because their owner had seen too many fans not only not singing along, but barely even paying attention. Ultimately, the city council stepped in to remind the Orioles of how much tourist revenue is generated for the city, and how Baltimore is so closely tied to the battles that were being sung about. Money won this argument. There’s a surprise.
The only way to ensure there will never be controversy surrounding the playing of the national anthem would be to scrap the tradition altogether, which isn’t going to happen.
As for the song itself – not a toe-tapper by any stretch – it’s hard to sing, and not everyone knows all the lyrics. There are highlight reels of various butchered efforts at sporting events demonstrating this.
The clunky melody came from an old English song that rhapsodized about getting drunk and chasing women. If you get a minute, it’s called “To Anacreon in Heaven,” and it’s available on YouTube.
Not everyone regards the national anthem with steely reverence. My high school team nickname was the Braves, which the student body would scream wildly on the last note of the song. Another team in our area was called the Stars, a word that was also screamed out in unison by their fans, this one in mid-song. Some fans of the National Basketball Association’s Houston franchise like to yell “Rockets!” when that word is sung. These disruptions are ignored, rightfully.
Every thinking person understands that we don’t live in a utopia, but that there are also countless achievements the country can be proud of. The national anthem can be a short meditation on all of those great things. But legislating patriotism strips away the grass-roots feeling of freedom that makes the song special.