God Bless America?

Tonight marks the return of the Los Angeles Kings to Staples Center for their first home game after an extended road trip. Although it's early in the season, it's the nature of Kings fans to analyze every piece of minutiae about this team, so questions abound. Will Alexander Frolov, benched Monday against Dallas, return with heart and the desire to win? Will this team finally get some secondary scoring? How about a better power play? And what exactly is the deal with Drew's teeth? Are they in or out?

But the biggest question in mind my for tonight is whether our national anthem will make a comeback. You heard me right....The Star-Spangled Banner has not been played at one Kings home game this season.

HUH? Every sporting event I've attended in my life has started with the national anthem! How is this possible? I wrote an e-mail to my ticket rep, who replied that the Kings are trying to bring back some play-off tradition, and the last time we saw post-season action the games started with God Bless America. Did I want him push my concern up the chain?

I decided not to make a huge issue of it at the time, but the more I think about it, the more it continues to bother me. Not playing the anthem seems unpatriotic, and as the daughter of a WWII veteran I take issue with that. But I respect the Kings organization, and they don't seem like the kind of people that would willfully violate hallowed cultural traditions, even for the sake of making the playoffs. So I consulted Wikipedia to get a little more educated on the issue. Here is what I found:

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson ordered that "The Star-Spangled Banner" be played at military and other appropriate occasions. Although the playing of the song two years later during the seventh-inning stretch of the 1918 World Series is often noted as the first instance that the anthem was played at a baseball game, evidence shows that the "Star-Spangled Banner" was performed as early as 1897 at opening day ceremonies in Philadelphia and then more regularly at the Polo Grounds in New York City beginning in 1898. However, the tradition of performing the national anthem before every baseball game began in World War II.^[6] Today, the anthem is performed before the beginning of all MLS, NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL games (with at least one American team playing), as well as in a pre-race ceremony portion of every NASCAR race.

OK, so there is precedent for the song not to be played. And the complete wiki article also mentions other songs that served as hymns of America prior to The Star-Spangled Banner being adopted as the official anthem of the United States by President Herbert Hoover in 1931.

But let's get to the real issue, which is public perception. What do the Kings fans think? Do they really even care? Back on October 13, Kings beat reporter Rich Hammond posted a blog entry polling the Kings faithful, and clearly I'm not alone.



I guess we'll see if anyone in the Kings organization is listening.