1" fingers pointed high in victory, and somber elbows resting on heavy knees after a loss. This is always some amalgam of buzzer beaters, "No. Now you get someone (you guessed it) blinking wild-eyed, followed by a losing team's player in tears or his head cradled in someone's hands. That's followed by another set of lyrical instructions:Īnything showing raw emotion - a coach yelling in protest or perhaps someone staring at the arena roof in contemplation - will suffice. What are you going to see? Well, there'll be an opening tip-off, clearly, perhaps followed by someone chasing after a loose ball going out of bounds, possibly ending with a slo-mo jump shot or under-the-rim dunk. The opening stanza practically comes storyboarded: Barrett's lyrics provide a road map through the song, giving at-home viewers something that is not so much formulaic as it is subliminal. To watch a few individual installments is to verify this claim, as there's an obvious method to the montage. There's a sense, not altogether false, that if you've seen one year's "One Shining Moment," you've seen them all. Every year, the script plays out the same - great teams lose, small schools stand up, and only one is left at the end - and then it's time to cue up "One Shining Moment." Weeks of behind-the-scenes work by CBS Sports engineers go into three minutes and five seconds of montage, but no challenge is too great when you're dealing with what Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski has deemed "the national anthem of college basketball." Moreover, the song has also provided a nice living for Barrett (who still owns the rights to its usage) and his wife and two daughters.Īnd while "One Shining Moment" was meant to be a cathartic afterthought to the trials of March Madness, a palate cleanser to wrap up a near-month of competition, it's also maintained its familiar mid-'80s schmaltz, the same sense of comfort that personifies so many sports-movies clichés.īut in an age of pop culture where everything old is new again, "One Shining Moment" serves as a reminder that for every skin-crawling collegiate scandal that pops up, there's one constant immune to tarnish. And the song, "One Shining Moment," will air Monday night for the 27th straight year as the music bed for an array of highlights honoring the memorable stories, comebacks, and heartbreak of the men's basketball tournament. The whole thing was seemingly undeniable." Had Barrett's friend shown up on time, life might've turned out quite different.īarely one year later, Barrett would become one of the most sought-after TV composers in the industry. I went home and, in 20 minutes, put the lyrics down and wrote the music. "God knows how that happened, but it just did. "I'm just waiting there, so I grab another napkin and I literally wrote all the lyrics on the napkin," he says. His friend ran a few minutes late, and Barrett couldn't shake the feeling he was onto something with this half-baked sports song. The next morning, Barrett had plans for brunch. He wrote it down on a cocktail napkin: "one shining moment." "I had played a lot of basketball growing up, and I realized I'd gotten an insight like, 'Hey, I know a lot about this and I'm going to write a song about it.'" There wasn't much semblance of verse structure or even a strong melodic direction - not like John Tesh calling his own answering machine in 1990 to hum out the burst of inspiration that became NBC's theme for its NBA telecasts - but there was a phrase that lingered. The self-effacing Barrett wasn't so surprised by that turn of events, but he was struck by the conversation and what he'd tried to convey. When he swiveled toward the TV during a Bird-led fast break and turned back, she was gone. To his surprise, she started talking to him, so Barrett stammered to try to explain the allure of basketball and, on some deeper level, the captivating nature of watching elite athletes perform elite skills. "She was so gorgeous, unless you were Robert Redford, you wouldn't even bother talking to her." "She could've been a Victoria's Secret model," he says. What had taken his attention away from Larry Bird and the Celtics was, as he remembers her, the most beautiful waitress he'd ever seen. ![]() ![]() None of these career paths had held much traction, but after playing a gig at the Varsity Inn, Barrett pulled up a stool, ordered a beer, and turned his head. David Barrett claims to have a fuzzy memory, but the night 27 years ago that a stunning waitress sat next to him in an East Lansing, Michigan, bar and forever changed his life? That he remembers quite well.īarrett was just 31 and could have been most generously described as a sometimes-guitar player, sometimes-composer, and sometimes-songwriter.
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