GOULET KEPT SENSE OF HUMOR AFTER ANTHEM FLUB

If Robert Goulet were alive, it's likely he would have called Christina Aguilera after her Super Bowl gaffe and said, "welcome to the club, kid."

Goulet made headlines when he flubbed the lyrics to the National Anthem at the May 25, 1965 heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston in Lewiston, Maine.

Goulet, a Broadway star best known for his booming baritone voice as Lancelot in "Camelot," had little experience with the National Anthem, having grown up in Canada.

Like Aguilera, Goulet mangled the lyrics, singing "dawn's early night" instead of "dawn's early light." Aguilera had a different spin:

In October 2000, Goulet told he was more than a little nervous on fight night.

He excused himself from a VIP dinner three times to go out on the porch and rehearse the song."I was scared to death," he said, and that was before he climbed in the ring with boxing legends like Rocky Marciano and Joe Louis.

Liston wasn't the only one who took a beating that night.

"I came into that town a hero and I left a bum," he said. It didn't help that Lewiston was his mother's hometown.

A couple years later he got some sound advice from a colleague.

Legendary opera baritone Robert Merrill, who has sung the anthem for every New York Yankees opening game since 1969, told Goulet to take a bowler hat and put the words of the anthem in it.

Sure, enough, recalled Goulet, "the next time I saw him, I swear that when he sang 'Oh say can you see,' he looked inside the hat three times."

He's long been forgiven. The Washington Redskins invited him to sing the anthem in the fall of 2000.

Goulet, a longtime Las Vegas headliner who died in October, 2007 at age 73, took a lot of heat for it over the years, but retained his sense of humor.

Here's my November 2007 column about his fun-loving side:

Singing legend Robert Goulet loved a good joke, but he positively lived for the epic "gotcha."

Jeff Motley, senior director of public relations for Las Vegas Motor Speedway, was on the receiving end of a near-cardiac inducing doozy at the 2001 Sam's Town 300.

Motley was wrangling the Broadway star into position to sing the national anthem when he saw Goulet taping the words of the song to the side of the microphone.

"I asked him what he was doing, and he said I obviously hadn't heard about the time he botched the words before the Ali-Liston fight."

Goulet was referring to the stage fright he suffered on one of the largest stages. He forgot the lyrics while singing the national anthem before the Muhammad Ali-Sonny Liston heavyweight championship fight in Lewistown, Maine, on May 25, 1965.

It wasn't a piece of sports infamy that Motley wanted to relive.

"Then he pulls out another piece of paper, which I couldn't see what was written on it. He said it was a poem to Dale Earnhardt, who had died two weeks earlier at Daytona. I almost had a heart attack. I tried to explain to him that we were on live television, under a strict time schedule and that we had Air Force jets set to fly over at the specific time of 'Home of the Brave.'"

Just as Goulet was introduced and Motley on the verge of a panic attack, "he looked at me, winked, smiled and started singing the anthem. He had gotten me."