NBC won’t be using John Tesh’s ‘Roundball Rock’ in Olympic hoops telecasts, which is a Tesh-sized letdown
Sports Media Watch first reported this a week and a half ago, but caught in the crush of NBA free agency we missed it until Awful Announcing alerted us to the news on Friday morning. Sorry, hoops heads, but NBC will not be using the famous "Roundball Rock" theme for its basketball games during the network's coverage of the 2012 Olympics in London.
Drag, sports fans. Drag. In case you forgot, here's how the John Tesh-penned tune flies:
NBC hasn't carried the NBA since the end of the 2001-02 season, so the song has been in retirement since then, but the network brought back the theme to much acclaim during its coverage of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. In a men's basketball tourney that is often filled with blowouts, this was a redeeming factor.
[ Related: The official song of the London Olympics ]
We completely understand why the network would shy away from using a song that is now entering its third decade, even if we completely and utterly disagree — because that brush of nostalgia that hit when the tune cranked up during the 2008 Games was enough to bring a smile, game in and game out. NBC could replace the intro with some reincarnated version of John Lennon telling us that all we need is love, man, before high-fiving a reborn Miles Davis, and it still wouldn't evoke as much. There's just no replacing it.
Though the NBC folks, bummer of bummers, will attempt to. Their call, because it's their network and their right to telecast an Olympics they paid quite a bit of money for the rights to, but pardon us while we crank up the YouTube as the network's announcers welcome us to courtside.
Related Olympic video on Yahoo! Sports:
Related Olympics content on Yahoo! Sports:
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• Australian hurdler's hot warm-up video becomes online sensation
