Forty-one years later, Norm Sonju chuckles in memory of the phone call he received early in the Mavericks’ charter season, 1980-81, from then-NBA executive vice president David Stern.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Coaches of other teams are calling us about the national anthem you do.”
Actually the Mavericks were not playing “The Star Spangled Banner” before games but, rather, “God Bless America.”
Stern didn’t realize that part. Nor, never mind his brusque greeting, was he phoning Mavericks general manager Sonju to bust his chops. Quite the opposite.
“Norm, seriously, coaches are telling me that you’ve got the guys lining up. How do you do it?”
Legendary though he became as NBA commissioner, Stern didn’t know the fledgling Dallas franchise would in the distant future raise eyebrows less approvingly by omitting patriotic music altogether.
And to be crystal clear, Sonju’s reasons for making Dallas the only NBA franchise to sub out the country’s official anthem with “God Bless America” and do so for 16 seasons are entirely different from Mark Cuban’s motives to begin Mavericks season No. 41 without song or ceremony.
“Not even close,” Sonju, 82, says. “Not even the same ozone.”
The correlation is that it’s the same franchise and city. And that in 1980 the NBA and America had, in the hearts and minds of many athletes and everyday persons of color, a national anthem problem. Lamentably for some of the same reasons that exist today.
Sonju says the story of exactly why he chose “God Bless America” as the Mavericks’ anthem of choice has never fully been told.
It’s the tale of an expansion franchise striving to gain a toehold in a football-fixated market, a faction of which had less than accepting preconceptions about the NBA and its predominant racial makeup.
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Cuban says when he decided to start the season without the anthem, “it wasn’t lost on me” that the song wasn’t played for more than one-third of the franchise’s existence.
Though comparing 1980 with 2021 largely is apples-to-oranges, then and now and everything between are part of Mavericks and Dallas history.
One year into the franchise’s existence, in stepped No. 9 overall draft pick Rolando Blackman. He arrived by way of Kansas State, where he forged a college basketball Hall of Fame résumé, and before that Brooklyn, to which he immigrated at age 8 from his native Panama.
He was a Maverick for 11 seasons, was a four-time All-Star, is one of three Mavericks to have his jersey retired and still resides in Dallas, where his four children were raised.
He doesn’t recall much discussion among Mavericks players, of color or otherwise, about why the franchise played “God Bless America” instead of the national anthem.
“As a young cat running around with a basketball, it was just a matter of hearing a different version of what America represented with the ‘God Bless America’ piece,” he says. “It was super. It was fine. No problems with what we [African Americans] were trying to get accomplished.
“But I love the opportunity and the things that Mark Cuban has done to continue to highlight the inequities that we have in our society.”
‘Hearing these attitudes’
The backstory of how Dallas got an NBA franchise often has been told.
The abridged version is that Sonju was president and general manager of the NBA’s Buffalo Braves from 1976-78. After overseeing the Braves’ move to San Diego, he moved to Dallas in early 1979 and joined forces with Don Carter to lobby the NBA for an expansion team.
When the NBA dramatically raised the agreed-upon ante, disillusioned Carter dropped to the background as a limited partner while Sonju negotiated with the league and scoured Dallas for investors.
He says he was taken aback by some of the negative feedback he heard about the NBA as he got to know Dallas and, just in case, began negotiating potential broadcast-rights deals and lease parameters at the new Reunion Arena.
“I’m hearing these attitudes,” he says. “By a lot, not all.”
Sonju says he also thought back to his mid-1970s tenure as part-time basketball coach at George Williams College just outside of his hometown, Chicago, where he grew up three blocks from Wrigley Field as the son of immigrants from Norway.
When he took the George Williams job, still fresh were the civil rights movement, the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Mexico City Olympics protest by American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos.
Well into the 1970s, it wasn’t unusual for Black college athletes to don black gloves during the playing of “The Star Spangled Banner,” as Smith and Carlos did on the medal podium in Mexico City.
NBA players didn’t blatantly protest during the anthem, but while running the Buffalo franchise Sonju noticed a general lack of interest during the anthem’s playing: milling, scratching body parts, gazing around the arena.
Such patriotic indifference, Sonju was convinced, would not play well in Dallas.
On April 15, 1980, Don Carter, emotionally prodded by wife Linda Jo’s love of basketball, phoned Sonju and said he wanted to make a counterproposal to the league, leading two weeks later to the Mavericks’ christening news conference at Union Station.
Sonju says he told Carter he wanted to enact two unconditional rules of any player who put on a Mavericks uniform: that they never get outhustled by the opposing team, and that they line up and face the flag during the pregame anthem, except in Dallas’ case the anthem would be “God Bless America.”
Sonju says he never told Carter, who died on Valentine’s Day of 2018, about the racial component behind his reasoning. Deeply religious Don and Linda Jo loved the “God Bless America” component, the unsubtle merging of divinity and country.
“I was desperate to do everything I could to earn the respect of people in the Metroplex, knowing that within those people there were some that had real attitudes, racially and other things,” Sonju says. “Wrong? Absolutely those feelings were wrong.
“But the fact was I couldn’t change how they feel, but I could change what they think by how we respond.”
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‘Best interest’
Sonju says he doesn’t know whether Black players were more amenable to standing still for “God Bless America” than they would have been for the anthem.
“I never once asked a player what he thought. Nor did I ask the staff. I made the decision because I felt it was in the best interest of everybody,” he says.
Nor, Sonju says, did players complain about being asked to line up shortest to tallest, coach Dick Motta and assistant Bob Weiss behind them, all facing the flag.
That was long before NBA teams lined up for the anthem the way they are required to do now, one on each side of the court, free-throw-lines extended.
Sonju says he favored “God Bless America” because it was shorter, therefore less chance of players fidgeting, and easier to sing, therefore less chance of botching than the often-bungled national anthem.
He also hired North Texas State (now North Texas) voice teacher Virginia Bodkin to audition and pick the soloist and had the instrumental recorded in various keys so singers could practice in the key of their choosing.
As for Sonju’s thoughts of the national anthem?
“The range is way more than an octave. The phrases are long. The tempo is very slow. The melody has all these leaps and bounds. It’s just not that easy. Proper execution means you must be a trained vocalist with a well-developed range and good breath control,” he says.
Like all expansion teams, the Mavericks of 1980-81 weren’t talented. But they scrapped. They dived for loose balls. And in the last home game of that 15-win season, 11,203 Reunion fans gave the team a 14-minute standing ovation.
Sonju cried, thinking of the myriad details and obstacles overcome that made that moment a reality.
“Now, I’m telling you, I don’t think that would have happened if any of our players had disrespected the flag or if there wasn’t the hustle,” he says.
‘More burdens’
Dallas’ full embrace of the Mavericks and NBA still was years in the making, though.
“I knew we were a new franchise and we had more burdens on us than other franchises,” Blackman says. “To establish and put the Mavericks on the map, not only in basketball but in a human way.
“To show that ‘These guys can play. And these guys are good people. They can be part of a fabric that would make America proud, especially here in Texas.’ That was important,” he says.
Blackman recalls he and his teammates going to many community events, on behalf of the Mavericks but also on their own, making personal impressions.
Lasting ones, Blackman hoped.
The Mavericks began to win — 28, 38, 43, eventually 55 wins and the Western Conference finals — to become the NBA’s so-called model franchise.
At no point, Sonju says, did anyone from the NBA ask the Mavericks to play “The Star Spangled Banner” instead of “God Bless America,” even when the league enacted the still-existing rule that “requires players, coaches and players to line up in a dignified posture” during the anthem’s playing.
Did fans ever gripe that America’s official anthem wasn’t played in Reunion Arena? Sonju says he vaguely recalls fielding a few complaints the first season, none thereafter.
Several longtime Mavericks employees contacted by The Dallas Morning News last week said they could recall no anthem-related fan or media backlash during the Carter-Sonju era, which ended in 1996 when Carter sold the franchise to majority owner Ross Perot Jr. and minority owner Frank Zaccanelli.
The new owners opted for “The Star Spangled Banner.”
“There was nothing wrong with ‘God Bless America,’” Zaccanelli says. “We just made a decision that, traditionally, sports teams play the national anthem. You stand up. You put your hand on your heart and you sing the song. It’s just tradition, right?”
Zaccanelli, a frequent guest analyst on CNN and Fox, has on several occasions defended the right of current athletes to kneel during the anthem.
“But when an owner decides ‘I’m just not going to play the national anthem,’ that’s a whole other level,” he says, alluding to Cuban. “It’s not good for the game. It’s not good for the league. And it’s not good for the Dallas Mavericks.”
Blackman strongly disagrees.
He is grateful that his family brought him to America as a child. He is grateful to be a citizen now. Grateful for his Kansas State scholarship, his degree, being an NBA player, watching his children grow up to be attorneys and technicians, realizing the American dream.
But in Blackman’s estimation, there has been too much regression in racial equality and social justice.
“I think the highlighting that Mark did was so fantastic, to keep the conversation. Because things get smoothed over and people continue down the same line,” he says.
“Inequality is unacceptable. We’re not going back. This is going to be out in front for now on. Forever.”
When America realized last week that the Mavericks had not played the national anthem in 12 home games, it became a viral national story, sure, but also part of Mavericks and Dallas history.
All of it. An adopted anthem for 16 seasons. No anthem for a month. And everything between.
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