O say can you see

 

Mark Cuban, the owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, has been experimenting with not playing the national anthem before the team's basketball games. Mark Cuban said that some fans were fearful of the national anthem, and that some felt their voices were being silenced. Fearing a backlash from some of its fans, the NBA quickly announced the national anthem would be played at games by all teams.

Despite that edict, the Dallas Mavericks have stopped playing the national anthem before home games and have no plans to start up again, team owner Mark Cuban confirmed to media outlets on Tuesday.

The Athletic first reported that the Mavericks had not played the anthem at any of the team’s 13 games at the American Airlines Center in Dallas. ESPN added that Cuban directed the team to end the practice after a discussion with NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, although he did not announce the decision publicly until Tuesday’s reports.

“It was my decision, and I made it in November,” Cuban said in a brief statement to The New York Times.

Cuban addressed critics of his stance, namely Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), saying on Twitter: “The National Anthem Police in this country are out of control. If you want to complain, complain to your boss and ask why they don’t play the National Anthem every day before you start work.”

 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dallas-mavericks-national-anthem_n_6023667fc5b6c56a89a5561c?utm_campaign=hp_fb_pages&section=politics&utm_source=politics_fb&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000013&utm_medium=facebook&fbclid=IwAR3HYs9ptVa4ZfKSfjWTdi1zXFb8WMIGuYIi8PDTI-bkzjAyPBpa6YN6WsU

 Predictably, Cuban’s decision about the national anthem was met by scorn by some of our country’s conservatives, but his actions are very much in character. He has repeatedly clashed with league official, and has been fined often. His ownership of the Mavericks is completely fitting, since he is very much a maverick himself – which is why he got to be a billionaire to begin with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Cuban 

As long as I can remember, the national anthem has been played at sporting events, but that was not always the case.

The first documented time that we know the song was played at a sporting event is in 1862 in Brooklyn. But the thing is, you had to hire a band. That was expensive, so it was only for special occasions - opening day, holidays - up until the time of World War II, where sound systems come in, so they could play a recording. And thus, they started to play it before every game.

In the 1950s, the Baltimore Orioles, of all teams, decided that playing "The Banner" before every game cheapened its impact. The general manager at the time decided that he was going to only play it during special occasions.

The Chicago Cubs owner felt the same way. And he did not play "The Banner" before every game until the '60s, during the Vietnam War. And even in the 1960s, the Chicago White Sox experimented with substituting "God Bless America."

Then 1968 happened, and things got crazy.

On January 23, the USS Pueblo was seized by authorities in North Korea.

The Vietcong launched the Tet offensive on January 31.

Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4.

Bobby Kennedy was assassinated on June 6.

The 1968 Democratic National Convention was held August 26–29 at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, Illinois, United States. On August 28, 1968, around 10,000 protesters gathered in Grant Park for the demonstration, intending to march to the International Amphitheatre where the convention was being held. At approximately 3:30 p.m., a young man lowered the American flag that was at the park. The police broke through the crowd and began beating the young man, while the crowd pelted the police with food, rocks, and chunks of concrete. The chants of some of the protesters shifted from, "Hell no, we won't go!" to, "Pigs are whores".

At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City in October, in the medal award ceremony for the men's 200 meter race, black American athletes Tommie Smith (gold) and John Carlos (bronze) took a stand for civil rights by raising their black-gloved fists and wearing black socks in lieu of shoes. The Australian Peter Norman, who had run second, wore an American "human rights" badge as support to them on the podium. In response, the IOC banned Smith and Carlos from the Olympic Games for life, and Norman's omission from Australia's Olympic team in 1972 was allegedly as punishment.

At the World Series in October, Jose Feliciano performed the national anthem on his guitar, and played it in a very non-traditional way. Fans were outraged, and his career suffered for a period of time, but eventually recovered.

 https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2019/04/12/jose-feliciano-susan-tigers-world-series

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQkY2UFBUb4

In 1990, Roseanne Barr sang the national anthem in San Diego, and did such a poor job that she was booed by the fans, and (briefly) retired from the entertainment business.

During the 2015 NFL season, Colin Kaepernick of the San Francisco Giants started kneeling during the national anthem in order to protest police violence and racism. Since becoming a free agent at the end of the season, he has been shunned by other teams – but he made a difference. Although he enraged Donald Trump, the league eventually came to the conclusion that he was right, and recently committed $250 million over the next decade to combat racism. 

https://www.npr.org/2016/09/04/492599463/how-did-the-national-anthem-get-to-be-a-mainstay-of-sports-in-the-first-place#:~:text=MARC%20FERRIS%3A%20The%20first%20documented%20time%20that%20we,come%20in%2C%20so%20they%20could%20play%20a%20recording.

 Francis Scott Key (August 1, 1779 – January 11, 1843) was an American lawyer, author, and amateur poet from Frederick, Maryland, who is best known for writing the lyrics for the American national anthem "The Star-Spangled Banner".

Key observed the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1814 during the War of 1812. He was inspired upon seeing the American flag still flying over the fort at dawn and wrote the poem "Defence of Fort M'Henry"; it was published within a week with the suggested tune of the popular song "To Anacreon in Heaven". The song with Key's lyrics became known as "The Star-Spangled Banner" and slowly gained in popularity as an unofficial anthem, finally achieving official status more than a century later under President Herbert Hoover as the national anthem.

Key was a lawyer in Maryland and Washington D.C. for four decades and worked on important cases, including the Burr conspiracy trial, and he argued numerous times before the Supreme Court. He was nominated for District Attorney for the District of Columbia by President Andrew Jackson, where he served from 1833 to 1841. Key was a devout Episcopalian.

Key owned slaves from 1800, during which time abolitionists ridiculed his words, claiming that America was more like the "Land of the Free and Home of the Oppressed". As District Attorney, he suppressed abolitionists and did not support an immediate end to slavery. He was also a leader of the American Colonization Society which sent freed slaves to Africa. He freed some of his slaves in the 1830s, paying one ex-slave as his farm foreman. He publicly criticized slavery and gave free legal representation to some slaves seeking freedom, but he also represented owners of runaway slaves.

 

It’s not the end of the world if the Dallas Mavericks don’t play the national anthem at their games, since the song will be played virtually every where else at public events – and EVERYBODY loved Lady Gaga at Joe Biden’s inauguration.

  

WATCH: Lady Gaga sings ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at Biden inauguration | PBS NewsHour