Hand on heart, I can't stand it

AMERICA AT LARGE/Geroge Kimball: Disguised in the trappings of patriotism, the jingoistic excesses which have accompanied sporting events in post-September 11th America sometimes strain the bounds of common sense, let alone good taste.

In the half-hour preceding February's Super Bowl in New Orleans, for instance, the National Football League evidently felt obliged to re-create several World Wars on the floor of the Louisiana Superdome.

(In the whole spectrum of ludicrous "traditions", can any be sillier than a squadron of F-14s flying in formation over a domed stadium?)

And, less than a month into the 2002 baseball season, it has become apparent that we may never hear, Take Me Out to the Ball Game at Boston's Fenway Park again.

That bouncy little tune had been played in concert with the traditional, seventh-inning

stretch since time immemorial, but, this season, instead of rushing off to the gents' room or the beer line, patrons are obliged to stand in place, doff their hats, and sing along while the house organist belts out Irving Berlin's God Bless America.

This new "tradition" provokes at least two observations. First of all, since the same crowd will have already endured at least one National Anthem (or, in the case of Opening Day in Boston, when the visitors were the Toronto Blue Jays, two), doesn't this represent overkill?

And second, when, exactly, did it become de rigueur to stand for God Bless America anyway? The other night at The Palace in Auburn Hills, Michigan, 18,000 or so proud Americans displayed their love of country by loudly hooting the Canadian national anthem.

Considering the events of the previous few days, this was particularly unfortunate.

Flying somewhere over Afghanistan last week, you will recall, a trigger-happy American pilot unloaded one of those "smart" bombs which proved to be so clever that it killed four Canadian soldiers and wounded eight others.

Understandably upset by this turn of events, outraged Canadians had been heatedly debating their nation's participation in Bush's "war on terrorism" even before the patrons at last Sunday night's NBA play-off game in Michigan, in an incredible display of insensitivity, loudly booed the playing of O Canada! just before the Toronto Raptors and the Detroit Pistons were to take the court.

WHILE some Canadian politicians have chosen to treat this as an international incident rather than the open display of mass stupidity it more accurately represented, I should hasten to point out that I've heard Canadian audiences boo their own anthem, too.

A quarter century ago, baseball fans at Montreal's Stade Olympique regularly booed whenever O Canada! was sung in English, as opposed to in its original French.

But our neighbours to the north don't need much of an excuse to get their noses out of joint when something like this happens.

Over the past couple of days, the best I've been able to determine, every newspaper in Canada has dredged up recollections of previous slights at American sporting events.

Most famously, prior to a 1992 World Series game in Atlanta, the US Marine colour guard marched into Fulton County Stadium with the Canadian flag hung upside down (the stem of the maple leaf was pointing toward the sky).

And, back in 1985 at New York's Yankee Stadium, Canadian fans remind us, the singer Mary O'Dowd famously butchered O Canada! with the whole world watching.

Never mind that notorious moment prior to the second Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston fight in Lewiston, Maine, when Broadway star Robert Goulet (a Canadian, incidentally) forgot the words to The Star Spangled Banner.

In fact, just a few months ago, prior to a boxing match at a Connecticut casino, the old Love Boat crooner Jack Jones mangled the American anthem so badly that he was booed out of the ring. (Later, between rounds of the main event, the Mohegan Sun's management apologised to the audience for Jones' rendition.)

Consider the reaction of the Fleet Street papers a couple of weeks ago over the perceived outrage when a Glasgow sporting audience comported itself disrespectfully in what was supposed to be a moment of silence for the Queen Mother.

I mean, wasn't this so wholly predictable that the real stupidity should be ascribed not to the crowd, but to whichever idiot thought a houseful of Celtic Park supporters actually might maintain 60 seconds of silence in memory of the Queen Mum?

Sunday night's rabble at The Palace would probably maintain that their booing of O Canada! was in response to Canadian fans' booing of our anthem last year at basketball games in Vancouver and hockey games in Edmonton.

In fact, as recently as last night at the Molson centre in Montreal, the home hockey fans booed the American anthem.

NOW, obviously, the best way to avoid this nonsense would be to banish anthems from ball parks altogether, but anyone making that sensible suggestion in today's climate would immediately be accused of membership in al-Qaeda. But it isn't as if this is a timeless tradition.

The Star-Spangled Banner - which, incidentally, didn't become our National Anthem officially until 1931 - was never played at baseball games before 1918, signalling the United States' somewhat belated entry into the first World War, but we've been stuck with it ever since.

During the second World War, the anthem was also regularly played at dance halls, and, prior to the featured attraction, at cinemas. They don't do that anymore.

So why do they play it at sporting events - and particularly at cross-border sporting events, where the incendiary potential should be obvious?

"The mob," Lenny Wilkens, the Raptors' American-born coach, pointed out Sunday night, "is easily led."