Fun and occasionally terrifying

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This article was published 07/12/2024 (614 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If Beverley Wynne doesn’t seem like her normal, boisterous self at work early next week, there’s a good reason why.

Wynne, an executive assistant for the North West Company, moonlights as an anthem singer at Winnipeg Jets home games. On occasions when the married mother of two is scheduled to appear in front of 15,000-plus rabid hockey fans — as will be the situation on Dec. 10 when the Boston Bruins pay a visit to Canada Life Centre — she tends to clam up around the water cooler, in an effort to preserve her vocal cords.

“Even when we’re driving to the rink, my husband will start chatting and I’ll be like ‘you know I don’t want to talk right now,’” she says with a chuckle, seated in a coffee shop at The Forks, a five-minute walk from her desk.

Wynne, a natural talent with no formal training to speak of, has another rule she adheres to on game days. Before leaving the house, she takes a few minutes to warm up by singing along to the exact same pair of tunes.

“It sounds cheesy but the first one is Lost in Your Eyes by Debbie Gibson and the second is From a Distance by Bette Midler, mostly because both fall right in my range as an alto,” she says. “They talk a lot about athletes being superstitious and I suppose I’m the same way.”

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Wynne (née Santos) was born in 1977 in the West End, a year after her parents and two older siblings immigrated to Winnipeg from the Philippines. She mock shudders, as she recalls her first “public” performance.

It was 1982, she was five years old and Laura Branigan’s Gloria was all over the radio. For a lark, she recorded herself mimicking the Grammy-nominated singer, using a portable tape player. A few days later, as she was strolling home from school with her classmates, her mother Rosita opened a front window and proceeded to blast her rendition of Gloria down the street, for all to hear.

“I was literally traumatized. It took years till I was finally able to listen to (Gloria) again.”

Luckily, Wynne wasn’t so shaken up that she ceased singing altogether. Rather, she became a regular participant in her school and church choirs, and also entered various Filipino talent contests, a few under the direction of Joy Lazo, a vocal coach who was the first Filipina-Canadian to be inducted into Rainbow Stage’s Wall of Fame.

In the spring of 1996, during her first year of studying business administration at Red River College Polytechnic, an acquaintance of hers associated with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers mentioned the CFL club was hosting open auditions for anthem singers, for the upcoming season.

Figuring what was the worst that could happen, Wynne threw her hat into the ring. A few months later, she was belting out O Canada for 30,000 fans at the team’s former home, Winnipeg Stadium, ahead of a Bombers tilt versus the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. Besides the fact the Bombers tamed the Tabbies 33-15 that September afternoon, Wynne also recalls how discombobulated she was, owing to that venue’s various idiosyncrasies.

“There was a three-second reverb at the old stadium. You’d sing, hear an echo and get trapped into going along with that, which could turn your minute-and-a-half anthem into three minutes,” she says, shaking her head at the memory. “I eventually got the hang of it, but yeah, even professional singers from out of town would comment how messed up it was there.”

Appearances at Bombers games led to regular dates with the Manitoba Moose and Winnipeg Goldeyes. In 2015, she sent a recording of herself singing The Star Spangled Banner to the Minnesota Twins a few weeks before she, her husband Michael and their two kids, now 20 and 22, were planning to catch a set of Twins baseball games at Target Field, in downtown Minneapolis.

Not only did the Twins respond affirmatively by inviting her to sing the anthem when she was in town, before she headed back to Winnipeg, a person associated with the club reached out to let her know the Toronto Blue Jays were due there in a few weeks, and was she interested in a return engagement to sing both the American and Canadian anthems? You betcha, came her reply. (Her remuneration for making the 1,400-kilometre round trip, plus meals and accommodations? A pair of free tickets.)

In 2017 the Jets’ regular anthem singer Stacey Nattrass was expecting her third child. It was highly likely she’d need a night off here and there, so the team held a series of pre-season tryouts for interested parties, Wynne among them. One game for her that season led to a couple more the next, and also the year after that. Nowadays, she averages between six and eight games, not counting — here she crosses her fingers — playoffs.

“It’s funny because by the time I did my first Jets game, I’d already been doing Bombers and Goldeyes games for 20 years or so,” she comments. “But now that I was on TV, people started stopping me to say ‘hey, you’re that anthem singer’ or ‘I never knew you did that.’”

Wynne, who has also sung for Brandon Wheat Kings hockey and University of Manitoba Bisons football (her son Zachary is a Bisons wide receiver), is steadfast about one thing when she takes the microphone: unlike artists who tend to put their own spin on a country’s anthem at glittery events such as the NFL Super Bowl and NBA All-Star Game, she feels it’s her duty to stick to the script, so to speak.

“To me, it’s important that people can sing along, without me going off in trills or changing keys every 10 seconds,” she says, mentioning she records every game she appears at, to critique herself the next morning. “In a sense I am performing but I believe it’s my role as an anthem singer to lead, not to be up there doing my own thing.”

If anybody knows a thing or three about leading an arena-size choir, it’s Jennifer Hanson, the Jets 1.0’s primary anthem singer for the last six years of the team’s existence, in the 1990s.

Hanson currently keeps herself busy fronting Jenerator, a pop-rock outfit that packs dance floors all over town with spot-on renditions of everything from Aretha Franklin’s Respect to Love Shack by the B-52s. From time to time, she invites Wynne, who belongs to a group of her own called Ruby Cap, to join her on stage.

“I met Bev when we were the house band for the Bombers and she was singing the anthem. We immediately had a connection and I’ve hired her whenever I’ve had the chance,” Hanson says, when reached at home. “She’s a really good singer, but more importantly she’s a team player and a lovely human being.”

Given their shared experience at sporting events, are we to assume the two of them talk shop when they find themselves in the same room? So far, that hasn’t been the case, Hanson reports.

“We don’t really discuss singing the anthem much because we all feel the same: it’s fun and occasionally terrifying.”

Back at The Forks, Wynne says some of her favourite moments include the Jets’ inaugural Filipino Heritage Night in November 2022, when she presented a Filipino cultural song during intermission, a Jets International Women’s Day event in March 2023, when she sang the Canadian and American anthems together with Nattrass, Sarah Baxter and Ashley Klimpke, and a Goldeyes game in June 2023, when she was accompanied by her daughter Madeline, who plays basketball for the women’s team at Canadian Mennonite University.

“I was also lucky enough to sing the anthems before a Minnesota Timberwolves-Chicago Bulls NBA exhibition game held here in Winnipeg in 2015,” she continues. “Fun fact: the only major league I have not sung the anthem for yet is the NFL.”

Last question: given her victorious sounding surname, is the home side pretty much guaranteed a “W” when she’s the designated anthem singer?

“I am 4-0 this year, including an exhibition game, but unfortunately that isn’t always the case,” she says, in regards to her Wynne-ing percentage. “There was a guy I used to see at Goldeyes games who knew all my stats. One time I was on a losing streak and when he saw me before the game he went ‘uh-oh, we’re in big trouble tonight.’”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca