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When it comes to the national anthem, allegiance runs deep

 
Plato Academy Charter School students, from left, Alivia Mandy, 6, of Clearwater, Kenlee Tomasko, 7, of Dunedin, and Kylee Mazak, 6, of Oldsmar, join in observing the "The Star-Spangled Banner," tthe national anthem of the United States of America, with their class mates at the beginning of class on Wednesday in Monica Beard's first-grade class at the school in Clearwater. DOUGLAS R. CLIFFORD   |   Times
Plato Academy Charter School students, from left, Alivia Mandy, 6, of Clearwater, Kenlee Tomasko, 7, of Dunedin, and Kylee Mazak, 6, of Oldsmar, join in observing the "The Star-Spangled Banner," tthe national anthem of the United States of America, with their class mates at the beginning of class on Wednesday in Monica Beard's first-grade class at the school in Clearwater. DOUGLAS R. CLIFFORD | Times
Published Nov. 18, 2016

TAMPA — Just about noon on a Tuesday, and Mission BBQ is packed. Diners swab forks of pulled pork through pools of Memphis Belle sauce. Football highlights cycle overhead on TV.

Then the clock flips from a.m. to p.m. The TVs cut to a static image of an American flag. And a voice comes through the loudspeaker.

"Ladies and gentlemen, please join us in honoring our country, as we do every day at noon, by singing our national anthem."

Everyone faces a flag draped from the center of the ceiling as The Star-Spangled Banner begins to play. Some sing along, some don't. But all of them stand.

When it ends, Larry Lee of St. Petersburg raises his hands in a V.

"Land of the free, home of the brave," he says. "That's it."

"Tell Mike Evans," adds his friend Sam Callahan, "to suck it."

Passions run hot when it comes to The Star-Spangled Banner, a 202-year-old song that in 2016 is at the epicenter of a national conversation about race, politics and protestation.

Evans, a receiver for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, found out this week when he declined to stand for the national anthem before a game last Sunday at Raymond James Stadium, an act of protest over Donald Trump's presidential election.

"I'm not going to stand for something I don't believe in," Evans told media after the game. He added: "The things that have been going on in America lately, I'm not going to stand for that."

He was following the lead of other athletes who have used the anthem as a protest, from Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics to San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who has sat or kneeled for the anthem all season in protest of racial inequality.

So swift was the backlash against Evans that within 48 hours, he apologized and announced he would stand for Sunday's anthem in Kansas City. "It won't happen again," he said. "I'll be standing with my teammates."

But forget Kaepernick and Evans for a minute, and forget the hot-takers leaning on the easy argument that disrespecting the anthem isn't cool. All that noise will eventually run its course. Just for a moment, let's not talk about why some guys don't stand for the national anthem.

Let's talk about why so many people do.

• • •

A nickel history of The Star-Spangled Banner:

1814: Composed as poetry by Francis Scott Key. Applied to an existing melody by British composer John Stafford Smith. Evolved over decades into a patriotic hymn.

1918: Played during the seventh-inning stretch of Game 1 of the World Series between the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs, a moment widely credited with bonding the song to American sports.

1931: Signed into law as America's national anthem.

1969: Jimi Hendrix.

1991: Whitney Houston.

2016: Colin Kaepernick.

Aesthetically, the song is all over the place: Clunky, bombastic, stuffed with ten-dollar words like "ramparts" and "spangled" that would get you laughed out of the Brill Building. There's no beat. No melody. It's no piece of cake to sing aloud. Some are discomforted by the fact that one of Key's later verses problematically mentions slavery.

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And unlike the omnipresent American flag, The Star-Spangled Banner is actually pretty easy to avoid. Where outside stadiums do adults ever hear it? This isn't India, where the national anthem is played in movie theaters; or Thailand, where it's played twice a day on TV, radio and government loudspeakers.

No, the anthem in America is most synonymous with live sports. The pregame anthem is our last mass nationalistic ritual, the grown-up equivalent of a daily Pledge of Allegiance. It can tend to get a little overblown — the field-spanning flags, the military fly-overs, the fireworks and cutting-edge videoboard graphics. But even if you spend the anthem watching players or judging the singer instead of thinking patriotic thoughts, the experience still engenders a sense of cultural unity. For these 90 seconds, we're all in this together.

"This is something that's been a part of this country for years and years and years and years," said country singer Chase Bryant, who has criticized Kaepernick in concert. "It's part of supporting the colors, and supporting the men and women overseas who fight for this country, and our freedom. You've got to respect it."

That's the spirit behind Mission BBQ's daily anthem. The Maryland chain, which has locations in Temple Terrace, Brandon and Town 'n' Country, opened on Sept. 11, 2011, and has a strong military and first-responder theme. The walls are coated with mission patches, Army and Navy football jerseys and service mottoes.

If you knew you couldn't play tomorrow, how hard would you play today? reads one. Another: Choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.

"The anthem has always been a part of who we are and what we do," said Mission spokeswoman Linda Dotterer. "It just came out of our love of country."

Employees are expected to participate in the ritual, though they can sit it out if it makes them uncomfortable.

"We want everybody to be happy," she said. "If this is not a good fit for them, no hard feelings."

That's basically the law of the land, too. The United States Code affords The Star-Spangled Banner the same protection as the American flag and the Pledge of Allegiance — which is to say, not much. True, the law states that during the anthem, "persons present should face the flag and stand at attention with their right hand over the heart." But flag burners and pledge protesters have had their positions upheld in court as free speech. If an anthem protest ever got that far, it would surely play out the same way.

• • •

Jude Adjei-Barimah grew up in Italy, the son of a proud Ghanaian father.

"When I was a kid, we used to play travel soccer, and we would go over to Austria and Germany and France, and play in all these different countries," said the Buccaneers cornerback. "They would play their national anthem before the game, and also play ours. Through sports, I learned how to have respect for everything that comes with the national anthem, because it has a different meaning for everybody."

Other countries play their national anthems before sporting events, though not always with the same pomp and circumstance as Americans. In some European countries, pregame anthems are sometimes limited to international competitions.

"In this country it's taken a little more seriously, more severely, than other places that I've lived," said Adjei-Barimah. "It holds a lot heavier meaning than it does in other countries, just because of the history of this country, fighting for freedom and the way it came about. Our country, back in Ghana, they gained independence back in 1957 from the British Colonies, so it kind of has some of the same meaning."

Over the last couple of decades, Americans have become more conditioned to think of sports on a global scale — consider the increased popularity of European soccer leagues, or the rise of regular-season NFL, NBA or MLB games in Europe, Asia, Australia and the Caribbean. Two-thirds of the Tampa Bay Lightning's roster was born outside the United States.

Anthem ceremonies, especially those involving players from other countries, can become international displays of sportsmanship. When the Tampa Bay Rays played the Cuban national team in March, with President Barack Obama in the stadium, players from both sides lined up across the infield as a choir sang both nations' national anthems.

Like his teammates Caleb Benenoch (Nigeria) and Gosder Cherilus (Haiti), Adjei-Barimah rarely hears his childhood anthem anymore. Outside the Olympics or World Cup, Benenoch guessed he hasn't heard the Nigerian anthem in full since college.

But on those rare occasions they do hear their native anthems, the effect might sound familiar to Americans.

"That's a part of your country," Cherilus said. "The hair on your back stands up. It doesn't matter who you are."

• • •

Inside a first-grade classroom at Clearwater's Plato Academy, a regional charter school, students are finishing their breakfasts and tapping on iPads when a staticky intercom hisses to life. The students bolt from their seats, slap their hands to their hearts, and sing.

Oh, say, can you see by the dawn's early light...

Most, if not all, of the 6- and 7-year-olds know every word, even spicing up the final lines with showy runs and falsettos. Then the music shifts.

Se gnorizo apo tin kopsi tou spathiou tin tromeri...

It's the Greek national anthem, and most of the kids know this one, too. Plato's curriculum is built around Greek culture and language, and it starts each day with this.

"It's about learning a culture, the Greek language culture, and learning as much about the country as possible," said founder Steve Christopoulos.

The school is all about bridging the world, not putting up barriers, and the dual morning anthems are a part of that. Christopoulos points out the similarities between the two songs, how they both cover hard-fought independence through military might.

"It's a hymn to liberty, basically," he said. "It's just like the American national anthem."

Parents can opt their children out of singing a foreign national anthem as part of their morning ritual. No one, Christopoulos said, ever does.

Contact Jay Cridlin at cridlin@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8336. Follow @JayCridlin.