The red light on John Tesh’s answering machine was flashing. With the push of a button, a tape began to play and a message that would change his life started playing.
It was from himself.
“Hey, this is an NBA-themed message for me,” Tesh wrote on his answering machine when he called home in 1989. “Here’s an idea. It goes something like this: ‘Bada-da-da-da-da—da—da…’”
The tune made its way from his answering machine to television screens around the world, eventually settling permanently in the hearts and minds of many basketball fans as the sport’s anthem.
This is the origin of the song “Roundball Rock,” which Tesh estimates was played 12,000 times during NBA game coverage as the theme tune on NBC from 1990 to 2002.
The song is now set to make a comeback in 2025, with NBC announcing 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 composed while sleeping in another country.
Tesh, who was the host of “Entertainment Tonight” at the time, took a month off from the show to cover the Tour de France.
There he learned that NBC was looking for a theme for its NBA Coveragehaving recently acquired the broadcast rights from CBS. A long-time musician who had previously composed themes for the NFLTour de France and other sports, he immediately started to chain notes.
“I was trying to put ideas into my subconscious,” Tesh, 71, told NBC in a recent phone interview. “What would a basketball theme sound like?”
He first heard the sound at 2am, the song from the future waking him up like the music from an alarm clock. He refused to hit the snooze button.
“I knew if I went back to sleep, the theme would go away, the idea would go away,” he said. “There was no keyboard, no tape recorder, no cell phone. So I called my answering machine and left a message for myself.”
NBA on NBC theme song begins: “That’s My Song”
Tesh walked into an airport sports bar in Atlanta and sat down shortly before the bar opened. The Los Angeles Lakers played the San Antonio Spurs in the first NBA broadcast of the season on NBC on November 3, 1990.
More than a year earlier, Tesh had returned home, retrieved his message, and shown up at the studio.
“I don’t know how many people sent in theme ideas, but I wanted to be the first to do it,” he said.
Tesh assembled a full orchestra to complement the song’s piano, bass, drums, and guitar. He increased the song’s tempo to about 120 beats per minute to match the average dribbling pace of a basketball fast break. He added background music that played beneath dramatic pregame narrations by Marv Albert and Bob Costas.
He soundtracked the careers of Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, Shaquille O’Neal and other NBA stars of the era.
“I knew it needed a fanfare, then a second movement, then a melody-less bed 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 didn’t arrive on cassette, but on a VHS tape, with the song playing over highlights of the 1988 NBA Finals.
“I took the imagination out of it so they could see the end result,” Tesh said. “When I got the call, they were like, ‘Hey, this works!’ I don’t even think I was competing with anyone. It was the first thing they saw.”
Now it was time for basketball fans to see it.
Tesh watched from the crowded bar as 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 brought their magic to Mr. Robinson’s neighborhood,” Albert said before the video cut 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-familiar orchestral melody of “Bada-da-da-da-da—da—da…”
“I motioned to the bartender and said, ‘Hey, you hear that?’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘That song.’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘That’s my song. I wrote it.’ And he said, ‘Great. Can I get you another beer?’ I was the only one in the room who was really excited about what was happening.”
More sports
“Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-basketball”
Tesh said the theme’s popularity grew after the NBA era on NBC, like an old chart hit that is best appreciated years later when it evokes nostalgia.
“It wasn’t until it came off NBC and people started learning how to play it on YouTube that it kind of became the theme of basketball’s halcyon days,” he said. “It became what it became after it aired.”
Tesh was at a restaurant in Los Angeles in 2013 when his cell phone started lighting up with text messages and phone calls.
“I went to the bathroom and I looked at my phone, my friend was like, ‘Are you okay? Oh, my God. I’m so sorry.’ That kind of thing,” he said.
John Tesh and “Roundball Rock” had just been parodied on “Saturday Night Live.”
Jason Sudeikis played Tesh, dressed in 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, who unofficially added the song’s lyrics.
“Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-basketball, gimme, gimme, gimme the ball, ’cause I’m gonna dunk it!” Robinson sang as Sudeikis emphatically played the keyboard.
“I watched it with my wife and I was like, ‘This is the coolest thing that could ever happen to me!’” Tesh said. “People think I have a brother named Dave, which I don’t. I don’t have any brothers at all. But now the song has the lyrics, ‘Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-basketball…’”
The sketch — and the fact that “Roundball Rock” has its own Wikipedia page — was proof of the staying power, mainstream success and continuing relevance of a theme that hadn’t been aired regularly in more than a decade.
The theme returned to basketball broadcasts in 2019 when FOX acquired the rights to Tesh for its college basketball games.
“(But) I got all these complaints from people saying, ‘This is not right! This shouldn’t be on college basketball. Take it down! This is for the NBA!’” Tesh said. “I got into one of these Reddit threads and said, ‘Hey, excuse me, but I have grandkids I want to buy birthday presents for.’”
Will the NBA theme on NBC be back?
The phone rang again recently, but this time it wasn’t Tesh calling himself. It was NBC.
He was asked if the network might use the theme for basketball coverage during the Paris 2024 Olympic Gamesas the network had done for previous Games. The call came in the middle of 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’re ready. We’d love to be a part of NBC’s return.”
Tesh, who continues to tour concerts and host his internationally syndicated radio show, recently traveled to Nashville to re-record the theme.
“We’re going to do the original version with a bigger orchestra,” he said, “because if we change one note, people will kill me.”
The final recording would come some 35 years after the first version was recorded on an answering machine. It was Tesh’s first rendition of a theme that would become the musical accompaniment to Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant’s three consecutive championships, as well as many memorable NBA moments.
“Ever since that answering machine message hit home, I’ve been singing melodies into recording devices, including my smartphone. “But it’s not the same anymore,” Tesh said. “There was something magical about that silly little cassette in the answering machine.”
