Having been born after the 1980 Miracle on Ice, a men's ice hockey best-on-best championship at the highest level has occupied a somewhat unique spot on my sports fan bucket list since before the term "bucket list" existed. The women, of course, had done their part in soccer (World Cup) and hockey (Olympics) as far back as I could remember, so while those championships remain fun, their relative frequency does make them a little bit less special (a compliment to those teams). The same applied to both Olympic basketball teams, and a combination of lack of entrenched historical importance and relative team success renders the World Baseball Classic somewhat lacking in this regard. Meanwhile, while I will always enthusiastically tune in to the men's World Cup, I do so without a sincere belief that the United States will ever win, or even seriously compete for, the title.
But men's ice hockey was different. While Canada was always the dominant professional hockey country in my lifetime, it was never by such a wide margin that it felt immune to the random bounces of the sport. And while the legacy of the Miracle on Ice has always loomed in the consciousness of American hockey, the United States had ceased to be a ragtag bunch by the time I gained awareness. The United States, like the Swedes or the Fins or the (pre-banishment) Russians, were a really good hockey country that could beat Canada. They just hadn't. And then, on the back of a historically great performance by the best goaltender in the world, Connor Hellebuyck, and with Jack Hughes matching his older brother Quinn's walk-off win two games prior, they had. Cue the national anthem.
Not the Star-Spangled Banner, a song which, in the immortal words of Vince Staples, don't even slap. But rather, the song that plays every time the United States men's and women's hockey teams score a goal or win a game, Lynyrd Skynyrd's iconic "Free Bird". Specifically, it starts playing roughly halfway through the song, when it turns from a perfectly nice, lovely blues-based power ballad to one of the most raucous, exuberant hard rock instrumentals ever recorded.
"Free Bird" has been a cliché for longer than it hasn't been. Famously, mostly sarcastically, yelled out as a request during concerts. Synonymous with the 1970s epic, part of the first generation that fully dropped the "and roll" from the rock genre. The signature song of one of America's great what-if musical legends, an act that blends edge, honesty, and outright populism like few others. And, cards on the table--I think it rules. I could be cute and try to declare that the best Lynyrd Skynrd song is actually "I Know a Little" or "The Needle and the Spoon", but deep down, I know this is the one.
What's funny about "Free Bird" on a sonic level is that I don't think there's anything specifically southern about what is now by default considered the ultimate southern rock anthem, aside from the obvious fact that all rock music derives from the American South. The themes of the lyrics are every bit as western as southern. In a literal sense, it's a breakup song about independence, the kind of value that can be attributed to whatever sub-region of America is trying to claim it at any given moment. It's bluesy, and Ronnie Van Zant's southern vocal affectation does bleed through even if it's not as though he is singing with a full-blown drawl, but the most iconic part of the song is a wild guitar freakout that just as easily could have been performed by Jimi Hendrix a few years before or Eddie Van Halen a few years later.
I'm sure there are people who dislike the song "Free Bird", but I'm not sure that I've heard much, if any, criticism of it strictly as a piece of music. Rather, there is distaste for what "Free Bird", or more specifically those who performed it, represent as a whole. And admittedly, Lynyrd Skynyrd do have a somewhat complicated cultural legacy, and I mean "complicated" in a true sense rather than a "they're jerks but I don't feel like being mean" kind of centrist way. Lynyrd Skynyrd, during their 1970s heyday, were Jimmy Carter Democrats with a deep and obvious appreciation for the blues and even wrote a song like "The Ballad of Curtis Loew" expressing sincere reverence for a Black musician (I've also heard interpretations that "Gimme Three Steps" is about a white protagonist approaching a woman of color and by extension her jealous husband, though I don't think there's really enough to say this is definitively true). They also hung the Confederate flag at their concerts. They were the kinds of white southerners who would claim that such an act was defiance against condescending northerners, but even if that is the case, it's not as though James Brown or Otis Redding were hanging the stars and bars. By the time Lynyrd Skynyrd disavowed the Confederate flag, the band was essentially Gary Rossington plus a tribute act, and fully entrenched in reactionary politics.
I choose to separate art from artist which the artist's personal transgression do not bleed into the art itself, and there's nothing political about "Free Bird". It's just a cool rock song. I have no interest in lecturing those who cannot get past the undeniably regressive elements of Lynyrd Skynyrd aside from any necessary steps to defend my own actions, which I will do because liking "Free Bird" does not cause active harm to anybody. In fact, I would argue that most of the distaste surrounding it has less to do with Lynyrd Skynyrd, who started to lean conservative in the 21st century but were never Ted Nugent-level political ideologues, and more about the kind of person who is presumed to like Lynyrd Skynyrd. Maybe some awful racists love them. Am I supposed to dislike Whitney Houston because Osama bin Laden liked her music? The final living songwriter of "Free Bird" died before I turned a year old. They exist in a different world than one in which I have ever lived.
In an America in which the idea of a shared culture is increasingly rare, arguably even delusional, the easiest way to ensure further social isolation is to conclude that anything that brings joy to one's adversaries must be bad, that culture is a zero-sum game with winners and losers. And while I rejected conservative politics before Donald Trump, this is an element that seemed to have arrived specifically with him. In the George W. Bush era, it never really occurred to me that a team would, or should, reject an invitation to the White House, partially because it never felt like an especially political event, even if of course it was by definition. But it wasn't as though George W. Bush was going to shake hands with Ben and Rasheed Wallace and then pivot to a screed about how lousy John Kerry was. Bush and Barack Obama, not to mention the presidents before them, seemed to see welcoming sports champions as a cool, somewhat superfluous perk of the job, and while some players would reject invitations, as was their right to do, most players just kind of went along with the ritual.
There is a case, one that I do not fully believe but one which absolutely can be rationalized, that the United States Gold Medal was a triumph of liberal values. The winning goal was scored by Jack Hughes, who has spoken unambiguously about his support for NHL Pride Nights. Jack and especially Quinn Hughes, the sons of a hockey playing mother who remains an active part of the women's program, have openly supported and boosted the women's team. The team's captain, Auston Matthews, is the son of a Mexican immigrant. Team USA defeated a Canadian team, led by a goalie in Jordan Binnington with a dubious history of Islamophobic social media posts, most vocally cheered on by Donald Trump's golf buddy Wayne Gretzky, and that's before we get into Hockey Canada's grotesque and very recent history of covering up for sexual assault allegations against their players. This is an extremely biased telling of what happened, but none of what I said was incorrect. But I don't blame Canadians who rooted for Canada. If I woke up tomorrow and I were suddenly a world-class hockey player, I could not play for any international team but the United States, so of course that's where I draw my fan allegiance. I would never begrudge those under similar circumstances in other countries.
That FBI director Kash Patel took a taxpayer-funded trip to Milan for the Gold Medal game is not a surprise, as it combined two of his three favorite pastimes--hockey and wasting federal money (I don't think he incorporated flexing about his girlfriend, which kept him from his personal Triple Crown). That he attended the game, while dubious from a money-wasting perspective, is not surprising or honestly all that concerning. That he proceeded, as a nearly forty-six year-old man, to go chug beers and celebrate with the team in the winning locker room is clearly undignified, but it very much fits the Trump administration playbook.
The mindset that would compel the FBI director to party with a bunch of guys mostly young enough to be his sons is related to the mindset that prompted the existence of the Turning Point USA alternative Super Bowl halftime show--a strident belief that they must be at the center of culture. It's extremely strange that Kash Patel was there not because he is a Trump appointee but because he is supposed to be a serious political figure. It would have been weird if Christopher Wray, Patel's predecessor, went into the locker room at all, much less immersed himself as a part of the event.
But Trump's immersion into sports culture is a major part of their public relations. Kash Patel is deeply unpopular--there is a certain brand of sycophantic Trump loyalist who will refuse to critique anybody associated with the administration, but it turns out that while the administration itself may not have taken the Jeffrey Epstein investigation seriously, a lot of people who voted for Trump but do not regard doing so as their entire personality did. The United States national team in any sport is extremely popular--for every performative (mostly) leftist who believes that they are the first person to discover that the United States has done some pretty rotten things, there are many, many more people of all political persuasions that root for Team USA no matter what. For many of us, rooting for the national sports teams is the one form of jingoism that we allow ourselves, as a treat, because it's one that doesn't actually matter in any substantial way. The number of people who saw Kash Patel with a room full of people who were overwhelmingly likely some shade of confused by his presence and decided that now they supported Team USA was virtually zero, but that wasn't the point. The point was to associate Kash Patel, and to associate Trumpism, with this popular thing. Forget "if you don't like Kash Patel, it means you hate America"--it means you must hate a thing that way more people like than America.
There are probably some Team USA players whose politics I would find repulsive. There are probably some Team USA players whose politics I would find agreeable. And there are probably many, many players who had no idea who Kash Patel was and was as confused about the short middle aged guy in the middle of the celebration and any of us were. But I'm glad they won, for the same reason I'm glad the Canadian goalie with the problematic tweets won the biggest hockey game of his life for the 2018-19 St. Louis Blues. You could argue that this compartmentalization is childish; I would argue that it is every bit as childish to eschew the very idea of joy and fleeting moments of happiness because of an absurd belief that the outcome of a hockey game contested by 40 millionaires is what really matters. But that's more judgmental than I would like it to be--ultimately, I feel bad that you can't feel the joy that my simple heart feels when the drums really start to pick up right after the eight minute mark of the American goal song. Call me basic--but this bird, you cannot change.
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