Cringe- worthy anthem performances
Anthem gaffes a nightmare for sports teams
TORONTO — Last May at the Memorial Cup, a rich-voiced young singer named Alexis Normand tried to tackle The Star-Spangled Banner and found a perilous fight indeed.
Like a speedy winger getting hooked from behind, Normand stalled out as she tried to summon the words. Fortunately, an empathetic Saskatoon audience was standing guard, ready to whistle their support and pick up the flagging Normand with the power of their collective voices.
If only the rest of us were so kind. Over on YouTube, uploaded clips of Normand’s shaky performance have been viewed well over 800,000 times. Of course, she’s hardly the sole target of such schadenfreude. The one sports bet that you can take to the bank is that a singer who screws up the U.S. or Canadian anthem will be the subject of blooper reels, international memes and snarky online commenters.
So it perhaps shouldn’t be surprising that sports organizations go to great lengths to ensure their singers are ready to belt out the two songs that almost every fan knows by heart. Still, those in charge of selecting the anthem singers have a nervous few minutes every time fans are asked to stand and sing along to the national anthems.
“I get like that every single time they perform,” said Anton Wright, the Toronto Raptors’ manager of marketing and game operations. “You’ve seen all the things that could go wrong. … You’re always hoping that they get through it.
“Luckily, knock on wood, we haven’t had anything that’s really, really bad,” he said. “We’ve had times where people have messed up, sung the anthem incorrectly at some points, but they haven’t done it that badly where it’s got all over on the news and on social media.
“But definitely,” he said, “when it’s a new person that’s performing for us for the first time, that’s always in the back of my mind.”
Many sports fans can mentally call upon the most memorable anthem screw-ups as if they were highlight-reel plays.
Among the most unforgettably awful performances? There was Carl Lewis at a 1993 NBA game turning The StarSpangled Banner into an offkey, rhythmless odyssey while members of the Chicago Bulls tried to mask their guffaws with their warm-up jackets. Similarly, one also must assume that after her screeching, irony-drenched version of the U.S. anthem at a 1990 San Diego Padres game, Roseanne Barr was barred from ever squealing the tune again.
And the gold standard for bizarre interpretations of O Canada has to be Greg Bartholomew’s sinful take at a Las Vegas CFL game in 1994, when he fused the melody with O Christmas Tree and possibly provided the highlight of Canadian football’s brief foray into the United States.
The anthems — particularly the long, winding Star-Spangled Banner — are not easy to sing. They’re particularly difficult in an arena packed with thousands of fans, typically without the acoustics or carefully tailored sound equipment most singers are afforded for public performances.
So why do we take such joy in watching them flail?
“It’s a song we all know — four-year-olds can sing O Canada ... so how could you screw up that?” said Dale Saip, vicepresident of business development for the Western Hockey League’s Vancouver Giants.
“If someone gets some rock song wrong, we don’t even notice. ... It’s that kind of a thing. Everyone knows it, they know what you’re supposed to do, and they’ll watch when you screw up. People pay attention.”
Further, many fans can relate to the terrified singers.
“We can’t all visualize ourselves scoring a hat trick for the Toronto Maple Leafs, but a lot of us can visualize ourselves and imagine what it might be like to sing the anthem for the Toronto Maple Leafs,” said Mike Ferriman, the Leafs’ manager of game presentation. “They connect with that moment. It could have happened to them.”
Saip frequently has his 26-year-old daughter and 21-year-old son handle the stressful job of singing the anthems at Giants games. They find encouragement from Giants co-owner Michael Bublé, not that the Grammywinning crooner is anxious to get out there himself.
“He said to me: ‘Anthems can be a career killer,’ ” recalled Saip. “You walk out there and forget where you are or something happens, and that’s not a good thing to have happen.”
All the teams interviewed for this story audition singers carefully before they appear in front of a home crowd (Ferriman estimates 300 to 500 hopefuls show up for the Leafs’ biannual tryouts). The teams also prefer to keep a small stable of anthem singers rather than experimenting extensively with drop-ins, even if a splashy name might bring a brief rush to the audience.
Even with experienced singers, teams take precautions. Wright of the Raptors has coordinators at the ready to run out and prompt a singer with the next line should he or she briefly lose hold of the lyrics.