The red light on John Tesh’s answering machine was blinking. With the press of a button, a cassette tape began to roll and a message that would go on to change his life started to play.
It was from himself.
“Hi, this is a message for me about the NBA theme,” Tesh said on his answering machine while calling his house in 1989. “Here’s an idea. It goes like this: “Bada-da-da-da-da—da—da…”
That melody went from his answering machine to television screens across the world, before permanently settling in the hearts and minds of many basketball fans as the anthem of the sport.
It was the origin of the song “Roundball Rock,” which Tesh estimates was played 12,000 times during game coverage as the NBA on NBC theme from 1990 to 2002.
The song is now set to make a comeback in 2025, with NBC announcing an 11-year media rights deal with the NBA on Wednesday.
NBA fans rejoiced on social media when the news was confirmed, celebrating the return of a song Tesh first came up with while he was asleep in another country.
The host of “Entertainment Tonight” at the time, Tesh had taken a month off from the show to cover the Tour de France.
There, he learned NBC was looking for a theme for its NBA coverage, having recently acquired the broadcast rights from CBS. A lifelong musician who already had composed themes for the NFL, Tour de France and other sports, he immediately began stringing notes together.
“I was trying to put ideas into my subconscious brain,” Tesh, 71, told NBC during a recent phone interview. “What would a basketball theme sound like?”
He first heard that sound at 2 a.m., the future song waking him like the music of an alarm clock. He refused to hit the snooze.
“I knew if I went back to sleep, the theme would be gone, the idea would be gone,” he said. “There was no keyboard, no tape recorder, no cell phones. So, I called my answering machine and left a message for myself.”
The NBA on NBC theme debut: ’That’s my song’
Tesh entered an airport sports bar in Atlanta and took a seat shortly before opening tip. The Los Angeles Lakers were playing the host San Antonio Spurs in NBC’s first NBA broadcast of the season on Nov. 3, 1990.
More than a year prior, Tesh had returned home, retrieved his message and reported to the studio.
“I don’t know how many were sending theme ideas, but I wanted to be the first one in,” he said.
Tesh assembled a full orchestra to complement the song’s piano, bass, drums, and guitar. He increased the pace of the song to around 120 beats a minute to match the average dribble rate of a basketball fast break. He added a musical bed that played beneath dramatic pregame montage narrations by Marv Albert and Bob Costas.
He conducted the soundtrack to the careers of Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, Shaquille O’Neal, and other NBA stars of the era.
“I knew you needed a fanfare, then you needed a second movement and then you needed a bed without any melody in it where Marv Albert could talk about this and that,” Tesh said.
He sent the theme to NBC executives, not as a demo, but as a finished product. It arrived not on cassette, but on a VHS tape, with the song played over highlights of the 1988 NBA Finals.
“I took any problem with imagination out of the mix so they could actually see it fully formed,” Tesh said. “When I got the call, it was like, ‘Hey, this works!’ I don’t even think I was competing with anybody. This was the first thing they saw.”
Now it was time for basketball fans to see it.
Tesh watched from the crowded bar as the intro to the game began. Narrated by Albert, the pregame montage mixed highlights and interviews with Lakers star Magic Johnson and Spurs center David Robinson.
“The Lakers have brought their Magic to Mr. Robinson’s neighborhood,” Albert said before the video faded to black.
Colorful lasers then etched the outline of NBC’s Peacock logo as Tesh’s theme began, its trumpeted opening and timpani roll giving way to the now very familiar orchestral melody of “Bada-da-da-da-da—da—da…”
“I motioned for the bartender to come over and I said, ‘Hey, you hear that? And he goes, ‘What?’ I said, ‘That song.’ He goes, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘That’s my song. I wrote that.’ And he says, ‘Great. Can I get you another beer?’ I was the only one in the place who was actually excited about what was going on.”
‘Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-basketball’
Tesh said the theme’s popularity surged after the NBA on NBC era, like a former chart topper that’s most appreciated years later when it evokes nostalgia.
“Not until it left NBC and people started learning how to play it on YouTube did it become sort of the theme for the halcyon days of basketball,” he said. “It became what it is after it was on the air.”
Tesh was at a restaurant in Los Angeles in 2013 when his cellphone began to light up with text messages and phone calls.
“I went to the bathroom and looked at my phone, my friend is saying, ‘Are you OK with this? Oh, my God. I’m so sorry.’ Stuff like that,” he said.
John Tesh and “Roundball Rock” had just been parodied on “Saturday Night Live.”
Jason Sudeikis played Tesh, dressed in his concert attire, and Tim Robinson played Tesh’s fictional brother, Dave. The duo pitched the theme to NBC executives played by Vince Vaughn, Kenan Thompson and Kate McKinnon — unofficially adding lyrics to the song.
“Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-basketball, gimme gimme gimme the ball, ‘cause I’m gonna DUNK IT!” Robinson sang while Sudeikis emphatically played the keyboard.
“I watched it with my wife, and I was going, ‘This is the coolest thing that could ever possibly happen to me!’” Tesh said. “People believe I have a brother named Dave, which I don’t. I don’t have a brother at all. But now the song has words: ‘Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-basketball…”
The sketch — along with “Roundball Rock” having its own Wikipedia page — was evidence of the staying power, mainstream crossover and endless relevance of a theme that had not been on the air regularly in more than a decade.
The theme did return to basketball broadcasts in 2019 when FOX acquired the rights from Tesh for its college basketball games.
“(But) I got all these complaints from people who were like, ‘This is not right! This shouldn’t be on college basketball. Take it off! This is for the NBA!’” Tesh said. “I got into one of those Reddit threads and I said, ‘Hey, pardon me, but I’ve got some grandkids I’d like to buy birthday presents for.’”
Will the NBA on NBC theme return?
The phone rang again recently, but this time, it wasn’t Tesh calling himself. It was NBC.
He was asked if the network could use the theme for basketball coverage during the 2024 Paris Olympics, as the network had done for previous Games. The call came amid the NBA broadcast rights negotiations, which sparked speculation about a potential return to NBC.
“The guy who called me said, ‘Hey, we don’t know what’s going to happen with the rights, but are you free and clear if we want to use the theme?’” Tesh said. “So, we stand at the ready. We’d love to be a part of coming back home to NBC.”
Tesh, who continues to do concert tours and host his internationally syndicated radio show, recently went to Nashville to re-record the theme.
“We’re going to do the original version just with a larger orchestra,” he said, “cause if we change one note, people will kill me.”
The latest recording will come roughly 35 years after the first version was taped on an answering machine. It marked Tesh’s debut performance of a theme that would become the musical accompaniment to championship three-peats by both Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, and many of the NBA’s most memorable moments in between.
“Ever since that one answering machine message struck gold, I’ve been singing melodies into recording devices, which now include my smartphone. But it’s just not the same,” Tesh said. “There was something magical about that goofy little cassette tape in the answering machine.”
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