The Best National Anthem Ever!
Calling thousands of professional sports games, and going to hundreds more as a fan, the anthem gets stale and trite, but not this one for me in South Korea at the Olympics in 2018.
If you’ve never been on foreign soil and heard the US national anthem while the country’s flag goes up with it, well, you’ve maybe never experienced something this cool and important. I have. In South Korea at the Winter Olympics in 2018 after calling the US Women’s gold medal hockey win over Canada.
We’ve talked about this here in this space before, this playing the national anthem and all that means at domestic sporting events in the United States. Most other countries don’t do this. In Europe, anthems played before sporting events are typical only in international play. It’s not like this is the thing everywhere - it’s - of course - something we do because - America. And so on.
A brief history - very brief…
Woodrow Wilson needed to sell World War I to a very reluctant nation a century ago. Among other things he wanted an “anthem” - so they dusted off the Francis Scott Key’s “In Defense of Fort M’Henry” poem, put it to an old bar jag, and presto - anthem. When the fellas came home from World War II, the anthem started getting play at baseball games. This caught on and spread, sport by sport. After 911, the anthem, and other pro-American salutes joined the fray. There have been kneelers and protesters and so on, and these days, because we’ve all gone silly, it’s another faux patriotic litmus test, like, if you watched Kid Rock you’re a patriot, and if you watched Bad Bunny you’re going to hell… you know.
But tomorrow - after the mens gold medal hockey game between US and Canada, you might get a chance to see real spectacle - and a real moment for the country, if Team USA wins. Because if they win - hang around and pay attention. It’s super different when that anthem is played in another country, celebrating a quantifiable victory against another nation, and the flag goes up with our anthem.
Let me tell you about my experience in 2018.
