Chances are, like me and a lot of other people, you’re watching a lot less NFL football on Sundays than you were years ago.
That wasn’t easy for me. I genuinely love everything about the sport. But I struggle to imagine a way that the NFL could have alienated me more than it managed to do so.
Rather than simply performing our National Anthem as a means of celebrating our country as the NFL did for years, it decided that there needed to be a separate song to specifically recognize black players and audience members. This song, called “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” was adopted in 1919 by the NAACP as the Negro National Anthem.
While I have nothing against the song itself, its very purposeful and symbolic juxtaposition to the American National Anthem is both unnecessary and inappropriate — and it is especially ridiculous and insulting given the genesis of their decision to include it in the opening ceremony of games.
If you’ll recall, this whole silly hubbub about the National Anthem and the American Flag began when San Francisco 49ers quarterback and multi-millionaire Colin Kaepernick got angry after having been benched in a late preseason game in 2016. His sitting during the Anthem was clearly a childish tantrum, but he certainly didn’t want to tell reporters the real reason why he didn’t stand for the Anthem. So instead, he made up a story about how he refused to “stand up to show pride in a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” and that led to the stupid meme of kneeling during the Anthem as a means of social protest.
Kaepernick, thankfully, has since become something of a joke. Anyone who follows football knows that he was benched for appropriate reasons, and the only reason he stayed in the public eye for so long is that Nike made a bet on his short-term SJW clout to boost merch sales, which led to a later Netflix special regaling viewers about how the NFL combine is essentially a slave auction, or some stupid thing like that.
That appears to have been his jumping of the proverbial shark, and few people take him very seriously anymore.
But as a very young child, I learned a story that contrasts with all this modern madness about the Anthem which still manages to stir feelings of patriotism. It was our beautiful National Anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” after all, that was blasted on all those loudspeakers in Berlin during the 1936 Olympics after Jesse Owens took four gold medals away from the supposedly furious Adolf Hitler’s Übermenschen.
For us kids in the 1980s and 1990s, this was something of an American legend. We all learned very early-on that Hitler refused to shake Jesse Owens’s hand after winning his gold medals because he was a black man.
As a child, that made me angry. Not only was it racist, but his slight against Jesse Owens was a slight against me, my family, and my countrymen. Jesse Owens’s greatness was American greatness, a birthright which I was fortunate enough to inherit by the grace of God, and by the sacrifices made by my family, friends, and countrymen.
It was only later that I learned that this wasn’t true. Hitler didn’t actually snub Jesse Owens at all. Hitler only shook hands with a few German and Finnish athletes. He was later reprimanded by the head of the International Olympic Committee, and told that he could congratulate all gold medal winners, or he could congratulate none. He opted for the latter.
What we do know is that Hitler gave Owens a “friendly little Nazi salute” after Owens won the gold in the 100-meter dash, and Owens later confirmed that they “exchanged congratulatory waves.”
The story of Jesse Owens being snubbed by Hitler for being a black gold medal recipient was a legend, certainly — but it wasn’t a vicious lie. The 1619 Project of The New York Times, which purports that the American Founders decided to take up arms against the British in 1776 to keep their black slaves? That is a vicious lie. It has no foundation in any truth whatsoever, and its sole purpose is to unjustly shame America and its past.
The “Hitler snubbed Jesse Owens” legend is of a sort that now seems quaint and largely out of fashion. It was a story, infused with the truth that Hitler undoubtedly believed Jesse Owens to be subhuman, which conveyed a meaning that serves to build pride in our national and cultural heritage. Namely, it taught children that greatness is color-blind, and that America was exceptionally excellent among nations and cultures precisely because it values merit over race and ethnicity.
And the Jesse Owens story is an archetypal American one.
Few might know, but Jesse Owens wasn’t actually named “Jesse” at birth. His parents named him “James Cleveland Owens.” Owens was the son of an Alabama sharecropper, and had nine siblings. His family moved to Cleveland in the early 1920s. James Cleveland called himself “J.C.” at the time, and when his Alabama accent met his Cleveland teacher’s ears, he would forevermore be known to that class and the world as “Jesse.” He went on to compete in track and field at Ohio State University before owning the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He then worked for the U.S. Department of State and the Illinois State Athletic Commission, later earning the Presidential Medal of Freedom and, posthumously, the Congressional Gold Medal.
Whereas Colin Kaepernick is the ungrateful beneficiary of blessed and rare fortune, Jesse Owens represents everything that makes this country great. And I simply cannot imagine that Jesse Owens would have preferred some “alternative” national anthem played after winning gold in Berlin due to the fact that his skin was a different color than the majority of Americans. You would be hard-pressed to find a happier person than he seemed to be after winning gold for his country, and he was clearly proud to have the “The Star-Spangled Banner” blaring as Old Glory fluttered proudly, just as many generations of Americans will always be proud of him for years to come.
This is something lost on NFL executives, and, sadly, to many NFL players. The Anthem is not played solely to honor the athlete. The song is played to signify that the athlete performs for the honor of his country and his countrymen of the past, present, and future.
And the NFL’s decision to suggest that our black countrymen require a separate Anthem is a disgusting and divisive affront to our Flag and Anthem. If it had any interest in salvaging its relationship with America-loving football fans, it would ditch the virtue signaling nonsense and just play The Star-Spangled Banner before NFL games this fall.
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