Top 7: Sports Show Theme Songs

It’s that time of year—the deadest time of year.

The only major sporting event this weekend is the Pro Bowl, which just added Johnny Knox to its roster. I’m not going to be watching the Pro Bowl.

The deadest time of year also means that Top 7 lists are tougher to be topical, so there will more than likely be quite a few random topics in the next few weeks. This week—sports show theme songs!

The No. 1 spot on the list was probably about as obvious as you can get, but this was surprisingly easy to compile, and there are probably still more that have been left out.

I must give an honorable mention to the HBO movie theme song that played while the letters in HBO were zoomed in on...couldn’t quite make the cut on a sports list, even though it surely was the lead-in to Major League a time or two.

On to the list.

7. This Week in Baseball

For those in their late 20s and 30s, the baseball highlights that were probably most seen in our younger years were Hank Aaron’s 715th homer, Carlton Fisk’s Game Six homer, and Bill Buckner’s error. Why? Because these were the highlights played at the start of This Week in Baseball !

When they added a new highlight one year (perhaps Kirk Gibson’s homer? I can’t remember), it was one of the biggest pieces of news of the year.

In pre-Baseball Tonight days, it was pretty tough to get good baseball information, and TWIB was probably the best source. Once the market became saturated with baseball info, there wasn’t really any need for the show anymore. They tried to repackage it with Ozzie Smith as the host, but it just was never the same.

6. Baseball Tonight

In the very early version of the song, very early on in the show, around 1990, the final chords were accompanied by some lyrics that went, “Baseball To-night.” It was very tastefully tacky.

Baseball Tonight was a freaking revolutionary show when it first came on. An entire show of baseball highlights without having to sit through hockey, football interviews, and college recruiting news? I might pee myself. The hour-long Sunday shows during baseball season were 30 of the best hours of television every year.

5. NBA on NBC

This is probably a generational thing choosing between the NBC theme and the CBS theme, but I prefer NBC because the Jordan years were the most entertaining era of basketball I can remember watching. And you can’t beat something that John Tesh plays in concert!

4. Monday Night Football

“Are You Ready for Some Football?” wasn’t just a one-line song; there were other words to it too. You know that it’s an influential song since it’s mandatory that every major weekly NFL game has a song accompanied by lyrics. The Faith Hill NBC Sunday night song isn’t bad, but it can’t match up to the original.

Remember when MNF “went off the air” and they made a huge deal out of it on ABC, only to have it aired the next year on ESPN, owned by the same company? That’s probably the most pointless send-off in history. That’s the Brett Favre comeback of TV shows. 

3. WWF Raw

In its heyday, the Raw theme song, though you couldn’t understand one single word of it, made the show around 15 percent better simply by hyping you up for what was to come. Pull up 40 random wrestling theme songs, and I would wager that you would admit (to at least yourself) that 20 of them were very listenable.

2. March Madness

Good God, just hearing this music puts you in a good mood. It reminds you of spring, maybe even spring break, or of taking the day off work to catch the first round games, where your bracket is still fresh and you may even get one or two of your upsets right the first day.

"One Shining Moment" may be the more famous CBS March Madness song, but the theme song to the games themselves is absolutely classic.

1. Original SportsCenter

If you were to pick one sound from any sports show that transcends sports, it would have to be the old-school “dah dah dah...dah dah dah.” You could find 100 people 25 and over who couldn’t care less about sports, who will be one of those people who ask who this Manning fellow is next Sunday, and probably 75 of them would be able to identify the SportsCenter theme.

The “dahs” are more subtle in the theme nowadays, but their influence is there (the good one starts at about the 5:00 mark on the clip below).

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