From the Vault: The Sports Delorean – Sports Music Videos

[Column originally ran December 2007, but Pedro Guerrero wearing a pink satin jacket is funny so we're breaking it out again]

If there was an equivalent to the Big Bang for classic unintentional sports entertainment it occurred sometime around the mid-80’s.

Three giant asteroids, each a phenomenon in its own right, smashed together with a force so great it produced some of the most treasured pieces of art the world will ever know.

Rap music. Music videos. Professional sports.

Quite simply it was the perfect storm.

No one is sure when or why it ever became acceptable for professional athletes to join together to make horrific music videos but at some point in time it appeared as if sports team’s across the country, nay, the world felt as if they had to get in on the action.

Thanks in large part to the brilliant people who invented YouTube, sports fans in 2007 have the opportunity to celebrate what may be the single most absurd trend in recent sports history – the team music video.

We’re certainly not the first website to point out these masterpieces. Our friends across the blogosphere at sites like With Leather, AOL Fanhouse, Can’t Stop the Bleeding, We are the Postmen and many others have dug up some of the finest three-minute clips on the web for all to enjoy. But questions still remain. How did they come about? What was motivation for them? How did they ever convince Pedro Guerrero to wear a pink satin jacket in one?

Most people assume that it started with the 1985 Bears and their famous Super Bowl Shuffle. While it is believed to be the only sports team video to be nominated for a Grammy – yes it was actually nominated for Best Rhythm and Blues Vocal Performance – the Shuffle wasn’t the pioneer, it was just the most popular.

The first one to pop up in the NFL is believed to be the 1984 classic “We are the 49ers” which featured Rakim-esque lyrics such as “We are unstoppable/Re-Markable/More famous than Cosby and the Huxtables”. When the 49ers went 15-1 and won the Super Bowl in ’84, apparently some other teams took note of the obvious. Cheesy rap videos = Super Bowls.

The Bears proved that theory to be true the following year with the Shuffle. The Seattle Seahawks did not. To much less fanfare, the Seahawks offered up their locker room blues jam “Cuz the Blue Wave is on a Roll”.

Be forewarned, after watching this clip you may feel an urge turn it over to the proper wild game commission, but rest assured that is not a Bigfoot sighting you’ve witnessed, it’s just Mike Tice dancing.###MORE###

By that point, the ingredients for a top shelf video had been established. All you needed to create an embarrassing piece of sports history were:

-cheesy rap alias’ for all the players
-choreography that causes world class athletes to constantly look around at one another to check if they’re doing it right
-synthesizer music (but that goes for all successful 80’s music)
-guys lip synching while obviously reading words off of a cue card
-white dudes who have no idea why they were invited
-players acting like they’re playing elaborate instruments, preferably horns

And most importantly, they needed absolutely atrocious lyrics like these courtesy of permed tight end Todd Christensen from the LA Raiders adaptation of a Stryper classic which they called “Silver and Black Attack”:

"

“I can’t run fast and I’m not too tall /
But I got hands that stick to the ball…
They say Todd just get yourself free/
And I say fine, leave the rest to me”

"

But if the NFL thought they had a monopoly on crappy team side projects, they were dead wrong. The LA Dodgers got into the act with their Hollywood themed “Baseball Boogie Bunch” that finally let the world see Mariano Duncan’s jheri curl unleashed. College sports didn’t have the lavish budgets that the pros had to work with, so they were forced to take to empty classrooms to lay their tracks. As Norm Stewart and his “Cats from Ol’ Mizzou” showed us, you don’t need fancy sets to be a hit, so long as you’ve got an awkward white guy with a mustache bungling up a rap verse.

Soon the phenomenon had spread all over North America. Canadians weren’t really into the “rap” so they put their own touch on it when the Calgary Flames unleashed “Red Hot” on their neighbors to the south. Sure it didn’t have the sharp lyrics that the others did, but it made up for it with an ample dose of Lanny McDonald lip-synching about climbing mountains.

Some trace the lineage of the “team song” back to an English Premier League tradition, so it was only a matter of time before they jumped back on board. Teams like Liverpool took rapping to another level simply by doing LL Cool J impressions in a British accent.

It truly was a trend that will never be duplicated…at least we all pray so. The concept broke down as the money became more lucrative, pro athletes became more and more self-serving and presumably the public’s demand for complete crap wained. Soon you couldn’t count on a team member to sit down and churn out two verses for the team song because it was no longer about the team. It was about the players’ own popularity. Instead of 25 man ensemble dance numbers, we had guys like Deion Sanders breaking away and making their own low budget videos.

But for a brief half decade, we saw athletes like we will never see them again – rapping in stone washed jeans. And when I have a little Joe Sportsfan running around asking me about what sports were like when I was younger, I’ll be proud to sit him down and say “son, when I was a kid, it was totally cool for random football teams from Scotland to make horrible music videos,” and then we’ll grab a glass of milk, a plate of cookies and watch the Glasgow Diamonds…together.”

JSF Weekly is written by Josh Bacott. He’s not sure if Mariano Duncan or Todd Christensen has a better perm. E-mail him at [e-mail]

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