Feliciano ignited a star-spangled controversy

Sporting News, The, Oct 25, 1993 by Dave Zang

Maybe if he had just closed with "the home of the brave," as the hundreds before him had done, had resisted tacking on the protracted and flowery "Yeahhhhh, yeahhh," the crowd might have paid him little mind. Then again, he was not easy to ignore. He was standing out there in center field, his boots, guitar, dark glasses and long, dark hair already giving him the look of the poster boy for Outrageous Possibilities.

But for the guide dog at Feliciano's side, most people in Detroit's Tiger Stadium for the fifth game of the 1968 World Series against the Cardinals might not even have known he was blind. But once the first stylized notes of "The Star Spangled Banner" slipped past his lips, all of America knew this: Jose Feliciano was attempting the first crossing of the gulf between sports and rock and roll. As he finished, stunned murmuring turned to cascading boos, making clear how lonely the voyage had been.

The last quarter-century has muted our remembrance of how each note that October afternoon seemed to call attention to yet one more tear in the nation's social fabric. We have come to accept the alliance between sports and rock music as a natural development in the world of corporate entertainment business. But in 1968, a year when it seemed the whole world might be turned upside down, sports and rock and roll sat on opposite shores of a divided culture, two mighty institutions staging a tug of war for the hearts and minds of American youth.

As assassinations and abominations seemed to ring the death knell that year for national togetherness, the older generations blamed the young for all American losses: for the pathetic inability to bomb tiny North Vietnam into submission; for the disappearance of a work ethic; for the discarding of romance's courtship phase; for the mockery of manly appearance; and for the corruption of melody. The last of these, embodied in the rhythm that drove rock and roll, ignited hysteria in fans and detractors alike. A national leader of the Christian Crusade was convinced that rock and roll was a Communist plot to render American youth useless through "nerve-jarring mental deterioration and retardation."

By the late '60s, the nation's young had rolled the menace of Elvis Presley's untamed pelvis, the long hair of the Beatles, the Fantasia of hallucinatory drugs and the biting political lyrics of folk singers into one lone, loud soundtrack to accompany their ridicule of old ways.

Sports, cloaked in the mythology of character-building, was rock music's perceptual opposite, a last stronghold for American values headed for obsolescence. No one disregarded the place of athletics in withstanding the siege. Already in 1968, college football players were breaking up campus protest rallies, going so far in April as to surround student-occupied buildings at Columbia University to keep food from reaching the long-haired squatters inside. In a year or so, President Richard Nixon would clumsily try to appease anti-war demonstrators with college football chatter, and Vice President Spiro Agnew would call sport the "glue" holding the country together.

But it was baseball, because it was both national symbol and the game with the strongest ties to the boyhood sentiments of even the most alienated of radicals, that created the deepest rifts. Before dying in a self-rigged terrorist bombing, Ted Gold, a member of the Weathermen, acknowledged that he could never become a fun-fledged revolutionary until he shed his affection for Willie Mays. James Kunen, student activist and author of "The Strawberry Statement," recalled that his long hair -- the "freak flag" -- turned a trip to Fenway Park into an afternoon of paranoia. "There were 35,000 people," he later wrote, "a great many of them staring at me. It seemed that they were saying, |Get out. This is our place.'"

Indeed, it was. Baseball spumed cultural rebels, and to open a World Series game -- the high mass of America's sporting rites -- with a heretic from the world of rock and roll was an affront akin to appointing Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin as the game's commissioner.

A good deal of this value tension was probably lost on Feliciano. He was a 23-year-old Puerto Rican, raised in the squalor of the Bronx. Cultural distance was a constant in his world, a ghost in his music. His self-taught, virtuoso guitar work shared space with a voice and arrangements that came not from any rock-and-roll songbook, but from the siftings of inner visions. In fact, Feliciano was not really a rock-and-roller at all. His cover of the Doors' "Light My Fire," though it had recently gone to the top of the Billboard charts, was regarded by young rock fans as a limpid offense to the original. Now, ironically, he was about to become, for one brief moment, regarded as the nation's most infamous rock-and-roll artist.

Tigers broadcaster Ernie Harwell was in charge of procuring anthem singers for the Series games in Detroit. Heeding the cautionary advice of Tigers management, who perhaps had in mind the unique spin that Aretha Franklin had given the anthem at that summer's Democratic National Convention, Harwell steered Motown's Marvin Gaye toward a traditional rendering before Game 4. It never dawned on Harwell that Feliciano, whom an acquaintance had heard at Los Angeles' Greek Theatre, would upset the cart. Before the game, Harwell took the young singer, a Yankees fan, to the Tigers' clubhouse where he sang and joked with the players.