To Sing or Not to Sing: On National Anthems
If you pay attention to basketball (we don’t, but we do watch these to keep up), or if you happen to be a huge Mark Cuban stan, you may have caught wind of a little off the court NBA drama that is stirring a lot of pots this week: Since the beginning of this NBA season, the Dallas Mavericks have not started their games by playing the National Anthem. Now, to underline, this is in the news this week, but has been a fact since the beginning of the nba season (aka DECEMBER). So what’s the tea, you ask?
Well someone over at the Athletic was doing their due diligence and noticed the lack to star spangled banner support and asked the team to comment, to which they responded “yo fuck that shit” (I am paraphrasing), and then this article came out and approximately five hours later the NBA responded: “we respectfully ask you not to fuck this shit”.
Obviously we are all familiar with how divisive the national anthem can be at sporting events (if you’re not, honey, are you okay? You sure? You can catch up here, here, here, here and like a million other places), but this being in the news once again just makes us wonder WHY we are subjected to hearing this national anthem in the first place? In most american sports leagues now, there is at least one Canadian team (shoutout to the NBA’s Toronto Raptors, the MLB’s Toronto Blue Jays, and the NHL’s teams in Edmonton, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, Montreal & others). But moreover, most of these leagues pull athletes from an INTERNATIONAL base, such as Greek-Nigerian NBA str Giannis Antetokounmpo, literally every hockey player (they’re all Slovenian I swear), and most baseball players (“america’s game my ass! The DR owns baseball!). Do you know where they DON’T play the national anthem before sporting events? LITERALLY EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD.
Ironically, this tradition, which people often hail as important patriotic act that supports our nation, was first established in 1862, when our country WAS IN A CIVIL WAR. Y’all I don’t mean to be political but who the hell decided to make all this shit that went down during the most divided time in our nation’s history, a time when the american experiment nearly failed and democracy itself was the price of battle, supposedly “patriotic”? It isn’t fam! This is not a hot take!
Anyway we’re here today to do more than question the inherently bigoted roots of american patriotism: we’re talking about basketball! It’s disappointing to see Adam Silver, vampire, reject the desires of the players and this team so bluntly, when it seems to go against what the NBA is building itself up to be. The NBA has worked under Smith’s tenure to establish itself as a global brand- playing games in India, China, and France (!). It touts an international fan base, and ballers of all ages have capitalized on this by playing abroad before and after their NBA Careers. Let’s just make this clear: Adam Silver is not doing this because he’s got a boner for the Star Spangled Banner. He, and the NBA, do shit like this to maintain control of the league, in the same way that Jerry Jones has flat out forbade Dallas players to kneel, and the same way that the NFL blacklisted Kap (yet still pretends to be woke). Just because players have more pull in the NBA, does not mean they have a say in larger issues. Nothing is scarier to a governing body of a league than the players or teams going off script: case & point the boycott in the bubble this summer. Pundits referred to the player protest to draw attention to the BLM movement as “the day the bubble almost imploded” but was it really the end of the world that these players chose to use their voice & platform to empower demand change?
