Blues criticized for adding corporate flag to color guard at Stanley Cup Final

The St. Louis Blues played their first Stanley Cup Final home game in 49 years on Saturday night, and some viewers were not happy with what happened before the puck dropped.

There was not problem with the singer of the national anthem, Charles Glenn, who performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” without fault.

It was one flag brought out by the color guard that upset people.

As you can see, there is an Enterprise Rent-A-Car flag being held by the color guard:

Enterprise is the corporate sponsor of the Blues’ arena, so that apparently was the justification for bringing out the flag. There don’t appear to be any rules against having a corporate flag in a color guard, but the Bruins didn’t have a corporate flag in the color guard ahead of the first two games in Boston.

It’s not something that I’ve seen before at a sporting event.

ESPN’s Keith Olbermann tweeted: “Well this is some serious (expletive). Straight out of the Milo Minderbinder flags in Catch-22”

Paul Lukas, who has the Uni-Watch blog, wrote in part: “It’s hard to express how gross and tone-deaf this is. Frankly, I don’t see why color guards should be part of sporting events to begin with (interestingly, the Blues use them as a way to pimp group ticket sales, which is something I’ve never seen before — do other teams do this?). But if we’re going to have color guards, it would be nice if they could stick to, you know, the colors. Speaking of which, the team flag next to the Enterprise flag doesn’t belong there either.

“The people holding the flags appear to be St. Louis police officers. The sight of a public officer of the law — on duty and in full uniform — being used as a vehicle for advertising a private corporation is scandalous. Or at least it should be.”

Some other Twitter users were displeased, too:

This story was originally published June 3, 2019 at 10:30 AM.