NBC Is Resurrecting the Relevance of Tim Robinson’s Greatest Ever ‘SNL’ Character
As NBC Sports prepares to make its aggressive return to the basketball world after 22 years out of the game, the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris will feature the renaissance of a cultural relic that remains timeless, but will become newly relevant again: Tim Robinson’s lyricism.
From 1990 to 2002, John Tesh, Emmy-winning composer and one half of the legendary Tesh Brothers, scored The NBA on NBC with the iconic theme song, “Roundball Rock.” For basketball fans who followed the league throughout the 1990s, there is perhaps no sound more deeply ingrained in their nostalgia than the blaring horns, blazing piano keys and pounding drums of “Roundball Rock” that elevated their heart rates as they prepared to watch Michael Jordan make history with his high-flying highlights and devastating dunks. However, for Saturday Night Live fans who witnessed Robinson’s slightly less dominant run on the sketch show during the early 2010s, “Roundball Rock” as NBC played it sounds disappointingly incomplete.
Right now, NBC is a frontrunner to return to NBA broadcasting after over two decades without a TV deal. Though the network’s contract with the league has yet to be finalized, NBC is already moving ahead with their plan to revive one of the most missed relics from their old basketball days. On a recent episode of The Dan Le Batard Show, Tesh revealed that NBC has approached him about re-recording “Roundball Rock” for use in their coverage of Olympic basketball games this summer.
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The real genius of the Tesh family better start his vocal warm-ups now.
“It's nothing firm,” Tesh told Le Batard about NBC's offer to have him record an updated version of “Roundball Rock" for summer coverage, saying, “But they said, ‘Hey, can you stay frosty on this?'”
And “frosty” Tesh has stayed, as opposed to his “fiery” demeanor during his and his brother's first meeting with NBC back in 1990. Tesh continued, “We’re actually talking right now about licensing (‘Roundball Rock’) to them for the Olympics in Paris. So we’re actually going in at the end of June, we’re heading to Nashville, and we have a full orchestra on hold and we’re going to re-record it."
“The recording still sounds — I think it still sounds great, but I wanted to make a few changes, maybe open up the middle,” Tesh said of “Roundball Rock.”
Now that he has regained creative freedom over “Roundball Rock,” maybe Tesh can bring Dave down to Nashville and restore the adaptation of his brother's poem to its original glory — or maybe NBC hasn’t had enough of the hammers.
