Along the Way: A not-so-Star-Spangled day to remember

Eighteen years ago today, before a Cincinnati Reds-San Diego Padres baseball game at Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego, one of the country’s most popular entertainers stepped up to a microphone and made history.

Comedienne Roseanne Barr managed to advance — by light years — the proposition that our national anthem is too sacred to be performed at ordinary sporting events.

Off-key and with a voice like a chainsaw, she not only mangled the Star-Spangled Banner, she tore apart a custom that had become more habit than homage.

And although the song is still sung (badly, for the most part) before games, Ms. Barr’s remarkable performance on July 25, 1990, unhinged the exaggerated solemnity of a professional sporting event’s pre-game ceremony.

Her monstrous bellowing made flesh creep. By comparison, banging pipes and barking dogs would sound melodious.

But what followed “. . .o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave” was worse.

Ms. Barr grabbed her crotch and spat. A nation gasped — a nation that didn’t get it.

There are 30 Major League baseball teams and 750 players, about half of whom adjust their protective cups and spit before, during and after the national anthem.

Others hang their heads as if ashamed of the song.

Roseanne was showing us what the Star-Spangled Banner means to most athletes about to engage in their sport, and to pop culture super-stars asked to perform it: Nothing.

Did she disgrace our country and Francis Scott Key’s masterpiece?

Yes, but no more than a great many professional ballplayers do every day. Sadly, there’s a trickle-down effect. You see the same disrespect at college and high school athletic contests.

Youngsters assume it’s cool to disrespect the song and the flag, because that’s what the pros do.

Roseanne Barr mimicked — and mirrored — this national humbug. There’s a time and a place for the national anthem, just as there’s a time and a place for prayer. And a ball game is not the place for either.

How many Green Valley bridge games begin with a singing of the Star-Spangled Banner? Not many, I’ll bet.

How many games of snooker in the pool halls of our land start off with “Oh, say, can you see. . .?”

How many backyard games of horseshoes?

There’s no need for the national anthem at every Major League baseball game, every National Basketball Association, National Football League, National Hockey League or NASCAR event. It’s become habit, that’s all — and a chance for some celebrity who knows the chairman of some public relations firm hired to put on the pre-game show , to revive his or her career.

Let’s keep the Star-Spangled Banner special by saving it for special events.

The first recorded performance of the song was on opening day of the 1897 baseball season in Philadelphia. It was played during the seventh-inning stretch of the 1918 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs.

During World War II, all the teams began playing the anthem before every game.

And I think it’s too much. It’s like that great line, first uttered by Joe Garagiola, I think, that says: “The last two words of the national anthem are ‘play ball!’”

Roseanne Barr wasn’t the first entertainer to butcher the song, not by a long shot. Various artists over the past 40 years or so have turned it into a blues, rock ‘n’ roll or ear-splitting heavy metal number.

It would be best not to play it at all.

And in her ingenious, though controversial caterwauling, Ms. Barr exposed to those who did understand, that it trivializes the national anthem to perform it at events not worthy of the song’s concecrated meaning.

Then she showed us how unimportant it is to the ballplayers.

After hearing a tape of her performance, President George H.W. Bush called it “ disgusting” and “a disgrace.” He didn’t get it, either.

I was in New York City at the time and one of the daily papers carried a one-word headline above a picture of Roseanne grabbing herself. The headline said: “Yuck!”

She has been called the poster child for those who’ve massacred the national anthem, and rightly so. But she’s not the only one.

We should reserve the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner for special games and special occasions, and enlist only those who are capable of playing it or singing it with some degree of success.

If that ever happens, we should thank Roseanne Barr for her outrageous performance 18 years ago today.

Corky Simpson, the first person inducted into the Arizona Associated Press Sports Editors Hall of Fame, writes a Friday column for the Green Valley News.