‘Roundball Rock’ returns to its sports theme mountaintop with the NBA back on NBC – The New York Times

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"I woke up in the middle of the night, got an idea," "Roundball Rock" composer John Tesh said. Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Lyn Alweis / The Denver Post via Getty Images, David McNew / Getty Images
So, yeah, John Tesh says. The origin story for “Roundball Rock” is real.
“I woke up in the middle of the night, got an idea,” he said from his home last week.
He was, at the time, in a hotel room in France when he woke up. It was 2 a.m. and he didn’t have a tape recorder with him. Being the early ’90s at the time, he didn’t have a cell phone, either. So, not wanting to forget the idea in his head before he fell asleep, he did the only thing he could think of — he called his house, where they used to have these things called “answering machines,” in case you weren’t home when somebody called — in which case, you’d leave a message. So, Tesh left a message on his own machine.
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“I called my answering machine, and when I got back to the States, checked the messages, put the answering machine on my piano, figured out what that was,” Tesh said. “So those two sections, those key sections — da da da da da – da da da, and then de de de de, de de, where the strings come in, that’s exactly like that, in the same key that I sang it (into the answering machine). But the key is, understanding, having lived in those television trucks with the edits, understanding what the template needed to be. And you can hear this in the song.
“There’s a fanfare that happens, and then there’s what’s called a ‘handoff,’ where the trumpets will hand off to the strings, and then the strings take it to the next level. But then, you have to have a breakdown section, because that’s when Marv (Albert)’s going to come in, and go ‘Today, Oklahoma City versus Milwaukee.’ And then the theme comes back, and finishes.”
What started as a few notes sung into a machine would become one of sports’ most iconic theme songs.
Three-plus decades later, “Roundball Rock” is as synonymous with the NBA as Johnny Pearson’s “Heavy Action” is with “Monday Night Football,” and Leo Arnaud’s “Bugler’s Dream” is with the Olympic Games, evoking memories of the NBA’s renaissance, especially in the 1990s, when Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls won six titles in eight seasons, with Hakeem Olajuwon’s Houston Rockets winning the other two.
But the song also identified NBC’s noteworthy coverage of the league, with Albert and Bob Costas’ play-by-play, illuminating analysis from the likes of Doug Collins and Mike Fratello, the always entertaining duo of the late Bill Walton and Steve “Snapper” Jones, along with Jim Gray’s and Ahmad Rashad’s sideline work and interviews.
“It means Sunday afternoon on Lost Mountain Road in my parents’ bedroom. … Watching NBC, some of the (bleeping) best memories I had as a kid were then,” Lakers coach J.J. Redick said last week. “There’s something so nostalgic about it.”
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And, two decades after NBC lost its NBA package to ESPN/ABC, NBC is back in the game, having regained an NBA package as part of the 11-year, $77 billion broadcast rights deal the league reached earlier this year with NBC (and its streaming service, Peacock) and Amazon Prime Video, while renewing its deals with ESPN and ABC. That left former longtime partner Warner Bros. Discovery, after 36 years of covering the league, out in the cold.
And Roundball is back too, with NBC announcing last spring that Roundball would, again, serve as the network’s theme for its new NBA package, which debuts Tuesday, with Oklahoma City hosting Kevin Durant and the Rockets on Banner Night, followed by the Warriors at the Lakers.
We live in an era where anything that happened 10 minutes ago is old-school, and anyone that remembers anything from a decade ago is dismissed. Yet “Roundball Rock” endures.
“Well, I think the thing you really want (a theme song) to do is brand the program they’re about to see,” said Tommy Roy, NBC’s longtime sports producer for basketball, Olympics and golf broadcasts, who picked “Roundball Rock” out of a stack of other potential entries for NBC’s NBA theme in 1990.
“Part of that is finding a piece of music that has a melody that’s memorable. So people will hum it. So when they start hearing this thing, it gets ingrained in their head, and they start humming it. And so, if you think of the Olympic music, ‘Bugler’s Dream,’ you can just start humming, ‘bah, bah, bah-bah-BAH-bah-bah.’ And Monday Night Football, same thing. … Part of it is you have to have iconic moments happening with the sports, so it gets associated with it. So, all those great Jordan moments.”
For the 73-year-old Tesh, “Roundball Rock” is a significant part of a musical journey through the sports world that began when Tesh was plucked from CBS News in 1982 to work for CBS Sports by Terry O’Neil, who’d been a driving force behind ABC Sports’ rise to dominance in the 1970s under the legendary sports and, later, news president, Roone Arledge.
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“Terry calls me, and he goes, ‘Hey, John, we want you to work for CBS Sports. We’ve cleared it with the news department,’” Tesh recalled. “I’m like, Terry, you’ve got the wrong Tesh; I can’t name four NBA teams.’”
But O’Neil told Tesh he’d see the world, and he didn’t disappoint. Soon afterward, Tesh was reporting from the Ironman Triathlon championships in Hawaii, and the Tour de France bicycle race. There, Tesh began a longtime collaboration with producer David Michaels, the younger brother of legendary play-by-play man Al Michaels. Tesh became the first anchor for CBS’ broadcasts of the Tour, from 1983 to 1986. But his musical chops as a classical piano player and trumpet player, while growing up on Long Island — “I was in a Blood, Sweat and Tears cover band,” Tesh says — were put to use with Michaels.
“He said ‘I know you’re a musician; why don’t you bring your synthesizers to France?’” Tesh said. “For four … summers on that event, he was editing in a van at various finish lines in France, and I was creating music on these 1980s synthesizers, and a Mac SE. That’s really where I learned to write sports music. The Tour de France has everything you need to be inspired by sports music; it’s the high speed, the downhills, the crashes, the suffering, all of it.”
(Ultimately, Tesh put out two albums of instrumental music, inspired by what he witnessed on the Tour.)
During his time covering the Tour de France, Tesh says, he began to hear rumors that NBC was going to get network rights for the NBA away from CBS, which had had them since 1973.
“That’s when I put that in my subconscious mind: What would that sound like?” Tesh says. Soon after came the sleepless night in France.
In 1990, NBC indeed won the NBA’s rights away from CBS. And it needed a new theme song to replace the one NBA fans had listened to on CBS throughout the ’80s, when Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Isiah Thomas each led their teams to multiple championships, in a three-way blood feud with the other two teams. Roy was tasked by O’Neil to pick the new song. He selected a handful as finalists.
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“What ended up happening was, I had put a date that these people needed to get these into me by,” Roy said. “And about two days, or maybe a day before that, all of a sudden, O’Neil, who was the executive producer at the time, came walking by my office, stuck his head in the door. And he threw a tape over to me at my desk and said ‘Hey, put this in the pile, too, for consideration.’ And that was the piece from John Tesh.”
Behind Jordan, but also with larger than life personalities like Allen Iverson, Olajuwon, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, Gary Payton and others, the NBA on NBC became a ratings juggernaut. During that period, the NBA began broadcasting games on Christmas Day. The 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona reinforced the NBA’s place atop the basketball world, with the “Dream Team” cruising to a gold medal — on NBC, naturally.
The league’s TV ratings, which had grown dramatically when Bird’s and Magic’s teams played each other for championships on CBS in the ’80s, went to the moon with Jordan and the Bulls on NBC, The 1998 finals between Chicago and Utah became the most-watched championship series in history, averaging 29 million viewers, as well as producing the most-watched individual NBA game ever — the last game of the Bulls’ “Last Dance,” Game 6, which drew 35.9 million viewers.
And “Roundball Rock” was the connective tissue for all of those moments.
“You don’t even need to play it,” Timberwolves guard Mike Conley said Monday, tapping his head, “it’s right up here.
“That theme song is what I relate the NBA (to), and my experience of the NBA as a kid. You could play that at any point in my lifetime and I would recognize that to be my childhood and remember the league to be. It’s almost like the authentic NBA to me. That’s it right there.”
Even after NBC lost the NBA to ESPN/ABC in 2003, and those networks went with their own theme songs, “Roundball Rock” remained the unofficial anthem of the pro game. And its influence was immortalized in a celebrated “Saturday Night Live” sketch in 2013, which parodies the network’s selection of the song, with Jason Sudeikis playing John Tesh, and Tim Robinson playing Tesh’s fictional brother “Dave,” who seeks to immortalize the song with his own, repetitive lyrics. When the “suits” at NBC want the music, but without the lyrics … well, the “Teshes” don’t take it well.
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SNL copied Tesh’s look at the time, down to the vest and shirt.
“Sudeikis was even doing my voice,” Tesh says now, chuckling. “If you listen closely, and I’ve run into Vince Vaughn since that first played, if you listen, Vince is reading cue cards, as the ‘president’ of NBC Sports. And he obviously didn’t know who I was. He says, ‘You know Tess. He wrote the Entertainment Tonight theme.’ He got my name wrong, and I didn’t write the Entertainment Tonight theme (though he co-hosted the show from 1986-96).
“We’re on the West Coast at that time, and all of a sudden, I start getting these texts from my friends in New York. They were these weird, ethereal texts – ‘Are you OK with this? … have you seen what’s happening?’ And my friend Lenny just said, ‘Just watch Saturday Night Live.’ And I watched it, and my friends were like, ‘Oh, my gosh; John is going to be so pissed off at this.’ And I remember watching it, and my wife, Connie (actress Connie Sellecca), turned to me and said, ‘This is the best thing that’s ever happened to you.’ That’s sort of the way the song was reborn, you know?”
Even though Fox Sports has used “Roundball Rock” for its college basketball broadcasts in recent years, there was no doubt what NBC was going to do for music if it won back the NBA rights.
“As soon as our folks got the NBA, that was mission number one, to get that back immediately,” said Roy, who moved on from the NBA to golf, where he’s co-produced NBC’s golf coverage for more than 30 years. “That piece of music has such a different feel from any other piece of theme music that’s out there. … It just fits perfectly.”
Tesh has more than 30 albums to his credit, and has been nominated for two Grammys. (His new album, “Sports,” includes both the classic and an updated, “shredded” version of Roundball.) He’s sold millions of albums over the years and still tours regularly. His discography is varied, highlighted with Christian, Christmas and romantic songs. Tesh often jokes that the men who attend his concerts with their wives and girlfriends often use those dates as “relationship currency,” sitting with their arms folded for most of the night.
But then. Tesh tells the story. And, sometimes, produces a basketball, and dribbles it, to introduce the syncopation of what’s coming next. And, then, comes da da da da da – da da da. And the men sit up in their chairs.
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“The band always has this joke, where we’ll save Roundball until the last quarter of the show,” Tesh says. “And I bring the answering machine up on stage and stuff. We turn, like, a one-minute song into a 15-minute bit, because we have all these screens behind us, and we show people playing it. We show the Saturday Night Live bit.
“And when we start the song, the guys start unfolding their arms, and they start whispering to their wives, ‘I was at McSorley’s, and this is my song!’ They’re doing their taxes in their head until that comes on, man.”
— The Athletic’s Dan Woike and Jon Krawczynski contributed to this report. 
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David Aldridge is a senior columnist for The Athletic. He has worked for nearly 30 years covering the NBA and other sports for Turner, ESPN, and the Washington Post. In 2016, he received the Curt Gowdy Media Award from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the Legacy Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. He lives in Washington, D.C. Follow David on Twitter @davidaldridgedc

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