As we celebrate the 244th anniversary of our Nation’s independence today, we’ll hear a lot of patriotic songs. It might be the only day we hear John Phillip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” We’ll sing along with Katherine Lee Bates’ and Samuel Ward’s “America the Beautiful.” And many of the celebrations will begin with our National Anthem, Francis Scott Key’s “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Originally written as a poem by Key as he observed the U.S. Flag still waving over Fort McHenry at dawn after the Battle of Baltimore in September of 1814, the words weren’t set to music until later that year.

And it was a long time before the Anthem was tied to any sporting events.

The Star-Spangled Banner was first played at a sporting event on May 15, 1862, at a baseball game. It was played, sporadically at sporting events through the rest of the 1800’s and early into the next century. It gained some traction during World War I and even more during the run up to World War II as patriotic displays surged.

President Woodrow Wilson made “The Star-Spangled Banner” the National Anthem by executive order in 1916 but it wasn’t until 1931 that it became the country’s official anthem by congressional resolution. Post-World War II, it became common place to have The Anthem to be played before every sporting event.

Whether you stand at attention with your hand over your heart or exercise your right to free speech while The Anthem is played, there’s no question it’s become a part of American sports that’s not going away.

You might have noticed they’ve added “And gentlemen please remove your hats” when they ask everybody to stand for The National Anthem. Many team owners were dismayed that wasn’t happening and realized that guys weren’t being taught that at home nor in school, so they’ve added that as a reminder.

One night at a banquet I theorized that I might have heard “The Star-Spangled Banner” more than anybody else based on the number of sporting events I attended through the years as part of my career.

“I’d have to challenge you on that,” my friend and former owner of the Jacksonville Suns Peter Bragan, Jr. said from across the room.

We both laughed and the conversation turned to how many times we’d heard The Anthem.

I’m sure facility and field workers, JSO officers and probably security guards here in town have heard The Anthem more than anybody. They’re at every event at every venue, so Mary, the very kind elevator operator I see everywhere, probably hears the anthem nearly three hundred times a year.

Bragan theorized he heard The National Anthem about a hundred times a year during his thirty-one years as the owner of the Suns. Between seventy home games, listening to auditions for singers, going on the road with the team, a trip to major league parks, football games and other sporting events, ‘Pedro’ developed a routine around The Anthem.

“As the owner of the team I’d always know when it was going to happen,” he explained. “Usually, I was just at the bench in the stands. It was usually a pause and analyze what was going on in the stadium.”

During his four-year college baseball career, Bragan said he had a different thought process.

“As a player, for some reason, it always caught me by surprise. I’d do a quick turn to face the flag and take my hat off. As a player I did think about the founding of our nation, and the flag flying over the ramparts, George Washington crossing the Delaware and things like that.”

Pedro did ask me to sing The Anthem one night before a Suns game. Knowing that I occasionally front some of the ‘Big Bands’ in town, He put me on the schedule in mid-summer. It’s a bit disconcerting because in a space that large, there’s a half a beat between when the sound comes out of your mouth and when it comes through the PA system. You must concentrate on singing and not listening, that’s for sure.

How many times have you heard “The Star-Spangled Banner?” We used to have a chance to hear it every day when television stations signed on or off the air. The first and last thing on the air was the playing of our National Anthem. But stations no longer sign off, now on twenty-four hours.

While I thought hearing The Anthem about a hundred and fifty times a year during my career was a lot, my friend Rick Wilkins chuckled when I mentioned that number.

“At least two hundred times a year,” Wilkins said, recalling his eleven-year Major League Baseball career. “Between the regular season and spring training, plus the other events I’d go to with my kids, maybe more.”

With that as a regular part of the game, it has to become a part of any professional athlete’s routine. They put their uniform on, they warm-up and they’re ready to play. But then there’s this two-minute pause before play begins.

“When I played for Bud Grant, we practiced how we were going to line up for The Anthem,” said Greg Coleman, who spent ten of his twelve years in the NFL with the Minnesota Vikings. “At attention, feet at a 45-degree angle, helmet under your right arm on standing the sideline.”

Admittedly an emotional player, Coleman, recently inducted into the Black College Football Hall of Fame said he would take that time as a player to refocus.

“It was the last solace of peace and a chance to calm yourself before the storm,” the Raines High grad explained.

Now part of the Vikings television broadcast team, Coleman, an ordained and licensed minister, delivers a “Pregame Preach” on TV right before kickoff. He has about 30-seconds after the Anthem to organize his thoughts for the spontaneous ‘sermon.’

And now, during The Anthem?

“You still have those times to reflect,” he said. “It takes you from a wide range of emotions. As a man of color, it forces you to think about how far we’ve come, but also about how far we have to go.”

Wilkins explained that in the Majors they don’t stand on the foul lines other than Opening Day and in the Playoffs. But the players were required to be on the field for The Anthem if they were on the active roster.

“I’d use that time to calm myself down,” Wilkins said of those two pregame minutes. “I would quiet everything down; eliminate external distractions and I would do that by focusing on The Anthem. It’s the calm before the storm.”

With his baseball career behind him, Wilkins admitted his thoughts during The Anthem have changed.

“I think more externally now,” he said wistfully. I think about my grandfather who flew in WWII. I think about my teenage kids who are ready to go into the world, stuff like that.”

Before September 11, 2001, you pretty much only heard The National Anthem before a sporting event if you were there live. Television always used those two minutes to go to a commercial break.

As the play-by-play announcer, I’d hear the producer say in my headset, “OK, pitch to break, they’re about to do The Anthem.”

There were many times I’d be doing a live report for the news, and they’d come to me while The Anthem was playing. I thought it would be disrespectful to talk during The Anthem so there would be a lot of yelling in my ear, “You’re live!” by producers back in the booth. Not sorry for that.

Seeing The Anthem on TV was reserved for the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the World Series or before games in the Stanley Cup Finals (where they’d also sing ‘O Canada’). Whitney Houston’s rendition at the 1991 Super Bowl and Marvin Gaye’s during the 1983 NBA All-Star Game are most memorable.

In fact, it wasn’t until after September 11th and officially mandated by the league in 2009 that NFL players were on the field for The Anthem. Before that, they did some final preparations in the locker room.

You’d think if you were in the service, you’d hear The National Anthem a lot. But that’s not the case

“We hear Reveille and Taps every day,” Captain Pat Rainey, USN Retired, explained. “When you’re in the Navy you hear The Anthem maybe forty times a year.”

It’s been interesting watching the Euro 2020 matches where the playing of the two national anthems is as much a part of the match as the opening kickoff. The fervor that the fans in the stands and the players on the field sing their anthems with is impressive.

You hear that here at home occasionally, but the playing of The Anthem perhaps has become so routine that some of the luster has been diminished.

But not for everybody.

During my limited athletic career, I’d use The Anthem as a time to focus in on what I was going to do in the game to execute the things I practiced. In my career as a reporter, that changed. I stand at attention, hand over my heart, thinking about how special it is that we live in this country, and we get to go to sporting events and have the freedoms we have, thanks to the sacrifice of so many. I thank my grandfather for coming here. And as I’ve gotten older, I usually shed a tear.

Which, much to my surprise, according to most of the people I talked with this week, isn’t unusual.

“As a service member the words in the national anthem mean so much,” said Rainey, who saw combat, flew with the Blue Angels and was Commander of Air Group Three (CAG3) during his twenty-six-year career in the Navy. “If you think about service to your country and the people who have given so much to make us what we are, it’s hard not to get emotional. Happens to me every time. Ask my wife.”

When Key penned the words to The Star-Spangled Banner he was being held on a British ship in the harbor because he knew of their plan to attack. So, the last line he wrote, looking for the Flag “By the dawn’s early light,” is a question:

“O say does that star-spangled banner still wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?”

“When I was in uniform and they’d play The Anthem, I’d think of that line,” Rainey explained. “One of my shipmates once pointed that out as a question and asked: ‘Are you putting forth your best effort to make this come true.’ That’s pretty powerful to me.”

Happy Fourth of July!

There’s a special bond between dads and their kids that only comes through sports. It’s different than almost anything else. Whether it’s being at a sporting event as spectators or as competitors, that bond is created by watching and learning.

At a sporting event from the stands, dads show their kids how they act in public, how to deal with victory and defeat and sometimes even how to deal with the heckling from your opponents.

As coaches, and sometimes players, dads show their kids how to prepare, how success comes from the work put in before the start of any game. And again, how to win and how to lose.

There are a lot of things I learned from my mom as the eldest of her four children. She schooled me in leadership and bolstered my confidence as a kid, mostly at the kitchen table.

But my bond with my dad was formed looking under the hood of cars, splitting wood in the backyard and talking about the Orioles, Colts and the Bullets.

I’m lucky to have witnessed so much of this with my father, and doubly fortunate that he, and my mother, are still around. At eighty-eight, much of his time now is filled taking care of my eighty-seven-year-old mother. Some of my friends never knew their dads; others lost them when they were young. I’ve had a relationship with my Dad as a kid, and as an adult. His business advice has been sage, his personal words wise.

And all of that started through sports.

The youngest son of immigrant parents, my father and his brother (who in very Greek fashion lived across the street from us) were the only siblings born in the United States. Sports weren’t much a part of their childhood and maybe that’s why my dad was glad to fuel my interest in all games.

Like a million other young boys, I waited for my Dad to come home from work. After school and finished working my paper route, I’d while away the time in the front yard, depending on the season, playing curb ball or throwing footballs at the six short bushy pines that guarded the front of the house.

He’d drive up, the catcher’s mitt or the football would already be laid out near where his car door would open.

My Dad throws like a catcher. Kind of a short stroke, not much follow through. I have been on the receiving end of his throws many times. Mostly baseballs, but footballs too, the occasional Frisbee or nerf ball, all thrown with that short stroke.

In the front yard I’d fire my best fastball and hear the occasional, “you’ve got to back up, you’re hurting my hand!” Which, of course, would make me throw all that much harder.

In IBM standard white shirt and tie, dark pants and wingtips, my dad caught my first curveball, saw my first failed attempt at a knuckler, and laughed at my imitations of Jim Palmer, Luis Tiant and Juan Marichal.

“Let me go see what you’re mother’s doing,” usually signaled the end of our session, but never before an encouraging “I think you’re going to win the Heisman,” or “you’ll take over when Brooks retires” as he bounced up the front steps.

My father learned a lot of lessons from his dad early on.

They didn’t speak English in the house, and everybody in the neighborhood was Greek. “Two eggs and a bacon,” was the extent of my grandfather’s English, although he never had any trouble communicating. When my father came home from school with a vocabulary test in the first grade, he had no idea what the words meant since he spoke no English.
“What should I do?” my grade school Dad asked. Rather than march to the school and demand he be taught in Greek, my Grandfather (Popou in Greek) logically responded, “Learn English fast.”

Understanding the power of an education, my father kept his nose to the grindstone (mostly) and eventually, at the urging of my mother, he was graduated from Johns Hopkins University using the GI bill.

Like any kid, I learned from my dad by watching. But most of my knowledge of his escapades as a kid and his relationship with his father, I know from stories my Dad told me.
He’s the best storyteller I know. With a bent toward hyperbole, he takes poetic license, as all good storytellers do, but never deviates from the truth. Many times, I’ve heard stories about my grandfather fighting the Turks and the Nazi’s. About the first time he met my mother (on an ice-skating rink) and about the day I was born.
No matter how many times he tells me that one, it’s always with the same emotion, the same passion. How he decided to name me after himself, (my mother’s idea) and not after his father (his dad’s idea.) And how it was one of the four best days of his life (I have two sisters and a brother.) I never really understood that story until I had children of my own, and now the passion and emotion he tells it with makes complete sense to me.

Having been a dad for nearly forty years, it’s the most gratifying thing that’s ever happened to me. And sports are one of the things that helped build my relationship with all three of my children.

Being totally unbiased, I’m lucky all of my children are smart, athletic and good-looking. As I’m told often, most of that they got from their mother. But there are some things they’ve gotten from their relationship through sports from their dad.

Since my daughters are my two eldest children, I was a “Girl Dad” first. There is something special about dads and daughters sharing the bond of athletic competition. Maybe because it’s the thing they most often come to you for when they have a question.

When your kids are growing up, there are lots of questions about studying and socializing, about what to wear and how to act in public. All things girls ask their moms about.
But when they want some help with their mechanics, or some competitive advice, Dad is the resource.

I know those things transfer to something else as they get older. I’ve seen it with my daughters as our relationship has shifted and grown.

But there’s something about that stolen glance from the court up into the stands after a particularly good play that I’ll always miss. That little acknowledgement of thousands of conversations, demonstrations, admonitions and words of encouragement all flashing by in the turned-up corner of a smile in front of a bouncing ponytail. If there’s anything better than that, I’ve never heard of it.

Equal to that is any dad’s bond with their sons. I know mine with my son, my youngest, was cemented through hours and hours of driving to practices, games, and tournaments in and out of town. Often talks about the daily and the mundane and many times the important and life-affirming topics that sons and fathers share, happened in cars and vans driving to and from wins and losses.

Kevin Costner captured some of that in his movie “Field of Dreams.” The final line of the film “Dad, wanna have a catch,” makes dads and sons misty eyed every time. The actor who played Costner’s dad, Dwier Brown says to this day, people stop him on the street to talk about their relationship with their dads, good and bad.
I’ve often thought Bill Murray’s character Bob Harris described it best in the movie “Lost in Translation” when he said about being a dad,

“The most terrifying day of your life is the day the first one is born. Your life, as you know it, is gone. Never to return. But they learn how to walk, and they learn how to talk, and you want to be with them. And they turn out to be the most delightful people you will ever meet in your life.”

If Bill Murray actually said that, he’d have included “and learn how putt” or something sports related.

Happy Father’s Day to my Dad, and to all the dad’s out there enjoying, or remembering times with their own dads and kids.

My kids laugh at my answer when they ask me what I want for Father’s Day. I always say the same thing: “Let’s play some catch.”

Standing in line at the hardware store the other day, the guy standing next to me started up a conversation with, “You know, I don’t watch the news anymore, especially the sports.”

He said he recognized me from my nearly four decades on television here in Jacksonville and stopped watching when my career was ended. He added he was just disappointed the way news is being presented in general and specifically how sports have “gotten away from the games.”

In the course of our conversation, the gentleman, who happened to be Black, was particularly frustrated with how politicized sports had become.

When I’m out, I hear that a lot. Is it true? Are people watching less news, less television and less sports?

The big answer is yes. The ‘Why?’ answer is a bit more complicated.

“I’m not happy with the NBA, or Major League Baseball,” one member of the luncheon crowd told me last week after a presentation I was asked give to his civic group. “How do I let them know I’m not happy with what they’re doing,” he said, implying that political overtones were fueling his displeasure.

“Do you watch the NBA?” I asked.

“Not anymore,” he said.

“How about baseball?” I queried since the season had just started.

“Not after what they did with the All-Star game,” he said, referring to MLB moving the game out of Atlanta as a political protest.

“Then you’re letting them know by not watching,” I explained. “If enough people agree with you, they’ll react.”

And the numbers bear that out.

In a recent poll by Yahoo News/YouGov, 34.5 percent of respondents said they watched less sports now because of social justice campaigns. TV ratings for all sports declined in 2020, almost a counter-intuitive statistic considering we were mostly homebound because of the pandemic.

Some of that has to do with the jumbled schedule. Even The Masters, playing November for the first time, saw a drop in viewership.

The NBA was hardest hit. Playing in a bubble, they lost 49 percent of their television viewers for the championship finals compared to 2019. While they had an uptick at the beginning of this season, the ratings have steadily declined since the opener. Less than six million people watched the All-Star game, an all-time low.

“My sense is there will be some sort of return to normalcy,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said before the season when asked about social justice messages on the playing floor and on players jerseys this year. “That those messages will largely be left to be delivered off the floor. And I understand those people who are saying ‘I’m on your side, but I want to watch a basketball game,’” Silver added.

There are no political messages on NBA courts this year, and soley players names have returned to the back of their jerseys. While the league has responded to the economic pressure brought to bear by advertisers and disgruntled fans, they say they’re still committed to community change.

“We’re completely committed to standing for social justice and racial equality. It’s part of the DNA of this league,” said Silver.

An increase of political commentary outside of the political arena and its negative effect on viewership is nothing new. The Oscars and the Super Bowl traditionally have been the highest rated shows on television year after year. As Hollywood has become more vocal politically in the last three decades, the Oscars viewership has dropped precipitously. Last year’s Super Bowl was watched by more than 100 million people. The Oscars had one fifth of that audience.

Perhaps the NBA is the league least worried about television watching in the United States because of their international digital presence. The league has more than 150 million followers across all social media platforms, more than the other US leagues combined. In the last three years, their social media views have jumped 43 percent.

Watching a highlight on one of your social feeds is monstrously more popular than actually watching the games.

It seemed that Major League Baseball was trying to offset any thoughts that their viewership might be down when they sent an extended press release touting the number of “streaming minutes” viewers were using through the first three weeks of the season. Their traditional watching viewership is also up over last year’s shortened 60-game, delayed-start season even if the World Series was the least-watched in MLB history.

With the smallest drop in viewership, the NFL was down just seven percent last year, and recently signed a more than $100 billion media deal that will take them through the next decade. (If you’re doing the math, that’s $312M per team, per year before they sell one hot dog, one beer, parking space, sky suite, sponsorship, well, you get the point.)

An aging fan base could be one easy reason for the decline in viewership. The average age for an NFL viewer went from 44 to 50 years old from 2000-2016 according to the Sports Business Journal. Yet the NFL had forty-one of the top fifty rated television slots last year.

It could be that with overall reduced television watching, sports broadcasts become a more valuable commodity. Even though they have a fixed starting time that doesn’t fit into the current flexible work environment most companies have adopted, sports fans will find their games and their teams. That’s why they’re so coveted by advertisers.

Viewing habits now dictate If you want people to watch, you have to make it available when they want it. Streaming services specialize in just that. Cord cutting has reached 31 million households in the US, diminishing the overall viewership pool. That’s why Nielsen estimates streaming is up nearly 75% year to year.

If you follow sports, you’ve no doubt heard of the number of layoffs ESPN has had over the past few years. It’s easy to explain when you see that the all-sports network was in over 100 million homes in 2013: That number is now around 83 million.

All of that trickles down to local viewership as well. On a good day, the local newscasts at six o’clock currently combined will have about 265,000 viewers including all channels. That number is down sixty percent from just 10 years ago.

Nielsen counts North Florida as the forty-first television market in the country with about 690,000 households. Using an average of 2.5 people per household, that adds up to 1.725 million people, meaning approximately only fifteen percent of area residents are watching the news live.

And the smaller numbers are not limited to the news. Overall television viewership is down. People are watching and doing something else, and on different devices.

Netflix holds their ratings very close to the vest, but their growing numbers have siphoned off traditional viewers year after year. Prime time shows on network television have seen their audience cut in half in the last five seasons.

Sports-wise, I know personally that local teams winning has an immediate impact. The highest rated shows I ever appeared on during my television career were centered around the Jaguars when they were winning. When the Jaguars aren’t doing well, like last season, those shows get ratings known in the TV business as “chicken scratch.” No discernible numbers. As in, not enough viewers to count.

Will overall viewership ever come back? Probably not centered on one platform with so many different options available to find information and highlights. Television viewing and especially sports television numbers are always highest in the fourth quarter of the year. If stadiums are full, that’ll be a good indicator of where the TV numbers might or might not go.

But the one common thread will be that sports fans will watch sports, somewhere. If there is a diminishing overall number of people watching television, a bigger and bigger share of that number will be sports fans watching a live game.