Sophie Cunningham Jumps On A Bar And Belts Out Toby Keith After Fever Win

WNBA star Sophie Cunningham climbed onto a bar at a downtown Indianapolis honky-tonk Friday night and belted out Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” with a roomful of Indiana Fever fans, hours after her team beat the Dallas Wings.

Cunningham had stopped in at Clayton’s Country Bar after the Fever’s 98-87 win over the Wings at Gainbridge Fieldhouse. Country singer Clayton Anderson spotted her at the end of the bar, grabbed a microphone and introduced her to the crowd — “Ladies and gentlemen, my friend, America’s sweetheart, Sophie Cunningham!” — before the two climbed up onto the bar to sing the post-9/11 anthem’s closing verse together.

WATCH:

Only Sophie Cunningham could go from playing a Fever game to randomly showing up at a bar and singing “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” with the fans. ????????????

She’s truly the freaking best. ❤️❤️ pic.twitter.com/FSvsnUOjPZ

— Gina Milan (@ginamilan_) August 15, 2026

Cunningham took the last verse and the final chorus as the bar sang along loudly enough to drown her out in stretches, pulling up a pant leg and kicking the air on the chorus’s best-known line.

“Hey, Uncle Sam put your name at the top of his list, and the Statue of Liberty started shaking her fist. And the eagle will fly and it’s gonna be hell, when you hear Mother Freedom start ringing her bell,” she continued, nearly drowned out by the other voices in the bar. “And it will feel like the whole wide world is raining down on you, brought to you courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue.”

Keith wrote the song in the weeks after the September 11 attacks, scrawling the lyrics around the edges of the back of a fantasy football sheet in about 20 minutes. He has said the song was as much about his father — Hubert “H.K.” Covel, an Army veteran who lost his right eye in the service and was killed in a car crash in March 2001 — as it was about the attacks. He did not originally intend to release it as a single, and for a time only played it for military audiences.

He recounted the song’s turning point in an interview with country music outlet The Boot:

“I was at the Pentagon, playing for a bunch of Marines that were shipping out to Afghanistan for the first time … I said, ‘I’m going to play this song. The band doesn’t know it, but I’m going to play it on my acoustic …’ And when I got done, [the commander] said, ‘You’ve got to release that as a single … That’s the most amazing battle song I’ve ever heard in my life,'” Keith recalled. “And so I prayed about it and discussed it with everybody for a long time, because I knew it was going to cause a storm. But at the end of the day, I was like, ‘If it means that much to those guys, then I don’t care. I’ll do it.’ And that’s when we finally decided we were going to release it.”

Cunningham, for her part, has been the focus of a lot of media attention in recent weeks, primarily because she has repeatedly defended women and girls and their right to have sex-specific spaces — whether those be on sports teams or in locker rooms.

Her comments have drawn rallies outside at least three Fever games, with demonstrators on both sides of the issue turning out — supporters in “Thank you Sophie” and XX-XY Athletics shirts alongside activists chanting for transgender inclusion.

Cunningham has been at the center of a national fight since ESPN published a profile on July 21 in which she said she wants “to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

She has repeatedly pushed back on being cast as a political figure, telling ESPN she is “very much in the middle,” though she has not budged on the underlying position: “I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense.”