Inexplicable anthem-singing puts politics on the field, ice

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/09/2017 (2910 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Let’s begin here:

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee an American athlete the right to stage a public protest on game days any more than the Second Amendment guarantees that athlete the right to bring a gun into a stadium on game days.

Constitutional amendments don’t work that way. And neither do workplaces, fortunately.

We may live in a Western democracy, but our workplaces remain very much dictatorships and we surrender all sorts of personal freedoms the moment we agree to take a job.

Your boss tells you when you have to wake up and what you have to wear, when you can eat and when you can go home, what you can say and what you cannot say.

And, yes, the boss will even, on occasion, tell you that you have to stand.

Not only are none of those things unconstitutional. They are the grease that keeps our workplaces — and the entire economy — functioning.

All of which is to say that while there are legitimate arguments to be made in favour of the anthem protests that are roiling football south of the border — and, as of Sunday, now north of it, too — the one advanced by many athletes over the weekend, including Winnipeg Jets captain Blake Wheeler, misses the point, I think.

Because the real point isn’t whether athletes have a constitutional right to stage a political protest at work while wearing their employer’s uniform — they don’t. Not in the U.S. and not in Canada. None of us who has a job has that right.

But the larger issue is this: why are professional sports events almost unique among all the ways that we gather as a community in North America in that we administer a patriotism test to both the participants and spectators prior to the commencement of proceedings?

It’s completely arbitrary.

No anthems before movies, theatre

Ever been to a movie? You don’t have to stand for an anthem before the main attraction. That would be stupid, right?

Well, don’t tell that to the people of Thailand, where moviegoers are required to stand for the Royal Anthem prior to every showing; failure to do so can be considered a criminal offence under the country’s arcane lese-majeste laws.

(Quick tangent: a Lars von Trier film dubbed into Thai is just as incomprehensible as the English version).

While that might seem outrageous to us — arrested for failing to stand for an anthem at a movie — I’d submit it’s no less outrageous than the American president railing over the weekend at football players for doing the same thing.

Because, again, why just sports events? Is it because these are live events we’re talking about, where the participants are right there in front of us instead of up on a big screen?

Well then how about live theatre? I’ve had season tickets to MTC for years and I’ve never stood for an anthem yet.

What we take for granted here in North America is almost unheard of in Europe, where national anthems are rarely played before, during or after professional sports events. The Europeans aren’t passionate about nationhood? I’ll direct your attention to two world wars that suggest otherwise. 

What? Theatre patrons and actors don’t love their country?

Or how about the fact that what we take for granted here in North America — and which is now, thanks to Donald Trump and his Twitter account, public issue No. 1 — is almost unheard of in Europe, where national anthems are rarely played before, during or after professional sports events?

The Europeans aren’t passionate about nationhood? I’ll direct your attention to two world wars that suggest otherwise.

Now, to be crystal clear, I have no quibble with the notion that, quite literally, the very least we can do as citizens is to rise as a community once in a while and reflect on all that we have and the sacrifices that were made by those who came before us.

Any exercise in which everyone shuts the hell up and pauses to actually think for a minute is needed now more than ever.

But then why have we rendered professional athlete one of the only occupations on this continent that requires you to stand for an anthem prior to the commencement of your workday?

‘People shouldn’t have to choose’

If Wheeler and his colleagues want to pursue an argument that their rights as citizens are being trampled, I’d argue they would do better to ask why they are being singled out in the first place than pursuing a fallacious constitutional argument.

Heck, if this is all about constitutional rights for professional athletes, what about their right to freely sell their labour?

Name another occupation where you spend your whole life developing your skills but when you’re finally ready to enter the workforce, you are required to toil for a single employer who has “drafted” you and you have to do it at below-market rates because of a rigged system that punishes young employees, no matter how talented.

Jacob Trouba’s rights are being trampled, all right. But it’s got nothing to do with the anthem.

Now that’s a constitutional challenge actually worth making.

On a weekend that a lot of dumb things got said, Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin said the smartest thing of all on Sunday in explaining why his team had decided to remain in the locker room during the singing of the national anthem prior to the Steelers’ game against the Chicago Bears.

“Not to be disrespectful to the anthem,” Tomlin explained, “but to remove ourselves from this circumstance. People shouldn’t have to choose. If a guy wants to go about his normal business and participate in the anthem, he shouldn’t have to be forced to choose sides. If a guy feels the need to do something, he shouldn’t be separated from his teammate who chooses not to. So we’re not participating today.”

“People shouldn’t have to choose.” Exactly, and they’re not required to choose anywhere else but at sports events.

Anthem, not athletes, put politics in sports

A confession: back in the days when I was the beat guy covering the Blue Bombers for this newspaper, there would inevitably be a couple of separatists in the Montreal Alouettes press box who would refuse to stand for the anthem every time we would visit.

They’d just sit at their spot, doing whatever they were doing while the rest of us rose to our feet.

It was infuriating. Like a lot of Canadians, my old man fought the good fight in the Second World War and the idea that some pampered separatist with delusional ideas about nationhood would disrespect all those Canadian veterans like that made my blood boil.

So I very much understand all those scenes from NFL stadiums over the weekend of fans booing players — both home and away — who’d chosen a variety of different forms of anthem protest in response to Trump’s Friday-night remarks, suggesting players should be fired or suspended for staging just such protests.

It’s the kind of scene that touches a lot of us viscerally, rubbing raw a nerve whose primitive architecture was laid back somewhere in the Pleistocene Era.

But that doesn’t make it right that we are asking those football players — or, for that matter, those separatists in that Montreal press box — to make a choice as a condition of their employment that the rest of us don’t have to make.

It isn’t athletes who have injected politics into sport. We did that the moment we began requiring everyone to stand for an anthem at sporting events.

And now that it has blown up after all these years? Well, it was a bit rich on Sunday watching and reading about all those NFL owners who suddenly now claim to stand united with their players on the issue after quietly blackballing Colin Kaepernick, the guy who started it all last season to highlight police mistreatment of minorities south of the border.

That was also hard to watch. And, truth be told, fewer and fewer people are, in fact, watching.

I will give Trump that; he was right about one thing he said and tweeted over the weekend: the NFL’s ratings are down again this season, 15 per cent through the first two weeks.

From the existential threat posed by concussions to the steady parade of players accused of domestic violence to the hopelessly mixed messages the league has sent on race, the NFL’s act is beginning to wear thin and people are beginning to find better things to do with their time.

It’s not just the players, it would seem, who are saying they won’t stand for it any longer.

email: paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca  

Twitter: @PaulWiecek