Every time a national anthem gets butchered like it was on Monday night before Major League Baseball’s Home Run Derby, it elicits widespread comment and wholesale judgments from all corners.
Country music singer and songwriter Ingrid Andress got out in front her own particularly dreadful performance of The Star-Spangled Banner on Monday night by sending out a social media post apologizing for her effort.
The post read as follows:
“I’m not gonna b——- y’all. I was drunk last night. I’m checking myself into a facility today to get the help I need. That was not me last night. I apologize to MLB, all the fans and this country I love so much for that rendition. I’ll let y’all know how rehab is. I hear it’s super fun.”
While that last line suggests a potential lack of sincerity, the apology itself sounded sincere.
Recency bias normally kicks in when these awful anthems happen and people declare the latest anthem bust the worst of all time. Andress’ was pretty bad, but to definitively call it the worst is probably wrong.
Roseanne Barr did as poor a job honouring the country of her birth as possible prior to a San Diego Padres game in 1990, complete with crotch grabbing and spitting at the anthem’s completion.
Barr was booed from the opening note and throughout her effort but the comedian laughed right along with her loudest critics.
Perhaps it’s the time of year that brings out the worst in anthem singers.
Andress’ offering came on July 15, 2024. Barr did her botch job on July 14, 1990.
Perhaps the worst rendition of the Canadian national anthem, and almost certainly the worst rendition by an American, came almost 30 years to the day before Andress added her name to the worst anthem singers of all time list.
His name was Dennis Casey Park and his fall from grace — or at least public face plant — came before a Las Vegas Posse/Saskatchewan Roughriders game on July 16, 1994, the actual regular-season debut of the Posse in Las Vegas.
Park, a lounge singer somewhat known to the Vegas regulars, was supposed to perform the anthem accompanied by background music but seconds before it was to begin he was informed the musical accompaniment was not available and he would have to sing it solo.
And further to his defence, he initially thought he was being brought in to sing the U.S. anthem, a job the team had already given to Dionne Warwick.
What followed was an epic anthem failure of all time, particularly given Park actually tried to do a good job, something in which neither Barr nor Andress seemed remotely interested.
But when Park’s first O Canada came out to the tune of O Christmas Tree, he knew he was in trouble and he never recovered.
“I’d never done ‘[O Canada]’ before and I needed the music to follow me up,” Park told Ron Kantowski of the Las Vegas Review-Journal 25 years after the incident. “If the music had played, I would’ve been fine.”
But without the music and fighting an echo, Park stuck with the O Christmas Tree tune to the final note.
Without any Canadians on the Posse roster, few on that side even noticed. But on the Saskatchewan side there was open laughter from at least a handful of the players who couldn’t believe what they were hearing.
Park apologized profusely afterwards. Still, his botched effort almost became an international incident.
Then prime minister Jean Chretien’s office sent a letter to the Posse stating its disapproval. Al Gore, the vice-president of the U.S. at the time, somewhat smoothed the waters on a subsequent visit to Ottawa when he offered “I was certainly glad to see that the U.S. football players reacted so strongly and better than the singer,” in reference to the Posse winning the game that day.
Park got the chance to redeem himself a mere two weeks later when he was invited to give it another go, this time before a game held in Hamilton before its notoriously tough crowd.
Park’s second effort was so much better than the first that the Blue Jays even had him fly in to Toronto and do the anthem before a Jays game later that summer.
It’s unlikely MLB will be as forgiving with regards to 32-year-old Michigan native Andress despite her public apology. We don’t see baseball offering up an invitation to Andress to give it another go, say, during playoff time, but Park is proof that a second chance can make things right again.