The New York Yankees line up for the national anthem before Game 3 against the Toronto Blue Jays in the American League Division Series at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx borough of New York City.Al Bello/Getty Images
After a military guard carried an upside-down Canadian flag onto the field at the 1992 World Series, America felt terrible.
Everyone – from the Marine who did it, all the way up the line to the president of the United States – made a contrite apology. George Bush the elder said sorry twice.
Nobody I knew was in the mood to be magnanimous. We were too busy feeling insulted. How could they be this ignorant? Had they never seen the Maple Leaf before? We assumed the answer, darkly.
Man, what a world that was. A wholesome mix of elaborate courtesy, post-Cold War bliss and we’re-all-in-this-together-ness. The flag thing proved it. We could get nose-to-nose with the most powerful nation in human history and trust that they would take a step back.
Then there’s what happened in New York over the past couple of days, and where that leaves us.
At both Blue Jays games in New York, O Canada was booed. And not just mini-booed. Really booed.
I’m sitting in a press box behind home plate, so it’s hard to say exactly how general the booing was. Maybe half the stadium?
All anthem booings are different. Some start off as a jeering, and are drowned out by cheers. Some begin strong and taper out as people get tired. It takes vocal stamina to boo for two whole minutes.
Tuesday’s anthem lasted from the opening bar to “… on guard for theeeeeee.” That’s an impressive amount of disrespect. There were cheers as it ended, but not combative ones. More reflexive.
Were some of them booing the country, and some the team, and some because that’s a cool sound to make? And in what proportion?
Who’s to say? They may not even know themselves.
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You’d have thought they’d got it out of their system, but Wednesday’s anthem booing was worse. Two-thirds of the stadium, I’d guess. A subset of people tried to start a ‘U-S-A’ chant in the middle of it. Far fewer people cheered at the end.
Hating Canada isn’t just for your angry uncle any more. It’s something the downtown cool kids do, too.
The real difference was the reaction – nothing.
No politician of note felt the need to say anything about it. The game must have been top of mind for the Prime Minister, who’s the sort of pol who sleeps in a hockey sweater.
On the other side, no American apologized. Swinging on behalf of Canada, even on a matter of no consequence, has become a political loser in America.
Regardless of the Blue Jays’ opponent on Sunday when the ALCS gets underway, the anthem performance at Rogers Centre could be a tense one.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
When things were good between us, you didn’t have to worry about how we were going over down there. You knew. We were good. Ignored, but good. Americans thought of us the way The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy thought of the Earth – mostly harmless.
One of the weirdnesses of the current moment is now we are no longer sure how we’ll be received. At LaGuardia on the way home, I was standing in the security line absently holding my passport in my hand. The woman ahead of me turned around, saw it and said, “Canadian?”
A year ago, I would only have taken that one way – as a friendly gesture. Now I didn’t know. (It was friendly.)
When it comes to America, we’re all Mark Carney – trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing, and doing so via small signs.
For many of us, sports will be the indicator, and the primary sign in sports will be anthems.
Toronto didn’t get the chance to boo The Star Spangled Banner back if the Jays played New York on Friday, but certainly would have.
I asked Prof. Evan Potter at the University of Ottawa, an expert in the ways countries talk to each other, what he thought about all of this. He took the view that our relationship with the U.S. is too resilient to be permanently harmed by random fans. With a small caveat.
“If the Blue Jays reach the World Series, we’re in a different ballgame,” Potter wrote. “(There’s) the possibility that Canada might beat America at its ‘own game’ while Trump plays his games with our sovereignty. The Jays would become a bigger cultural phenomenon–uniting even the Canadians who call innings ‘periods.’ That’s no bad thing for Canada, or for Prime Minister Carney the next time he’s invited to the Oval Office.”
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In that the case, bring it on.
Upcoming for the Jays, you couldn’t pick two bluer redoubts in the American polity than Detroit or Seattle (though different shades of blue). If either of them boo O Canada, that will tell us something.
If the Jays make the World Series and it happens in Los Angeles – the American city with the largest Canadian expatriate community – that will tell us something else.
It will suggest that our problem isn’t with one side of the aisle. It’s with the country. That we’ve lost our place as a special friend and become Mexico – an acquaintance that bears keeping an eye on.
Trade is variable and confusing, but sport is consistent and simple. It happens on a calendar. If you want to make a point, you know exactly when you can make it.
I expect this pattern will continue. Not at every game. That would be exhausting. But at the biggest ones, when national pride is mixed into the competition. We started it at the 4 Nations. They’re choosing to extend it.
This sort of ritualized mockery is harmless in itself, but a little sad. It’s the end of a once great camaraderie. We’ll still run in the same circles, but we won’t be able to assume the closeness that we shared for a century. From now on, co-operation and basic decency is on a case-by-case basis.
If it’s ever to be fixed, we’ll know that’s happened when someone wonders if it’d be a fun idea to stand up and boo, but decides they don’t want to do something they might have to apologize for later.