He Created the Sports Theme Song You Didn’t Know You Knew

Part of what makes a theme song effective, Barry said, is that “you never get sick of hearing it.”

Clearly, TNT has not. Usually, according to Rabin, the network will update graphics and other parts of the broadcast — except the hosts, of course — every three years or so. But the theme song has stayed the same for almost two decades. It has become a character of the show, much in the same way as Johnson, O’Neal, Barkley and Smith. (Like Tesh’s, this theme has appeared on “Saturday Night Live,” but as part of a larger sendup of “Inside the N.B.A.”)

“To me, it’s kind of a signature,” Johnson said. “If somebody has their back turned, and they’re in the house doing something and have the television on for background noise and they’re waiting for something, when they hear that song, they go, ‘OK, the ‘N.B.A. on TNT’ is on. It’s like the stamp that says the N.B.A. is coming on.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/sports/basketball/tnt-inside-the-nba-theme-song.html