On September 23, 2018, a 7-year-old girl walked out onto the grass before the LA Galaxy took on the Seattle Sounders. She held a microphone that looked almost too big for her hands. Thousands of fans were in the stands. The players stood in a line behind her.
Her name was Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja.
A few days earlier, the Galaxy had run its first ever social media contest to find a national anthem singer. Lots of people entered. Malea’s parents sent in a video of their daughter. The club picked her.
How do you get ready to sing for a whole stadium when you are seven? Malea had her own way. She practised every night with her dad. And when there was nobody else around, she sang to a lamp.
Then the moment came.
She did not wobble. She did not rush. Her voice rang out across the stadium, strong and clear, and she hit every big note in “The Star-Spangled Banner”, a song that makes grown professional singers nervous.
Watch the players’ faces. Some of them can hardly believe what they are hearing. The crowd starts cheering before she has even finished, and by the final line the whole stadium is roaring.
Afterwards she said she had been thinking she could not do anything wrong, “because it’s a really special song to America.”
Galaxy superstar Zlatan Ibrahimović shared the video and named her the “MVP of the Game”.
The clip went around the world. It has been watched more than 17 million times on the league’s channel alone, and it ended up in Google’s Year in Search video for 2018.
Malea, who has been singing since she was one and also plays piano and violin, was invited back that December to sing at the MLS Cup final, in front of more than 70,000 people. She later received a golden ticket on American Idol and even starred in a Hollywood film with Colin Farrell.
But for many people, she will always be the little girl who practised with a lamp and then made a stadium go quiet.
Did you get goosebumps watching her? Tell us in the comments.
