Picture this: It's the closing minutes of the latest installment of action between the Ohio hockey team and archrival Penn State. The Bobcats are down by a goal with less than a minute left. The goalie is pulled and the face-off is in the Ohio offensive zone.
What do you play? What do you play?
Well, unlike my counterpart who would rather lull you to sleep, if I had the responsibility -and I often dream I do -there would be nothing but Europe's The Final Countdown blaring through the Bird Arena speakers.
Since 1986 (cough, six million copies sold, cough), Countdown has been bringing sports fans to their feet in venues across the athletic world.
Be it football, baseball, hockey or basketball -and I swear I heard it watching curling once -Countdown is an excellent song to pump up the crowd.
Honestly, who doesn't know the chorus? It's the final countdown!
Now, if you are going to let Patrick over there try to convince you that any song is a better fix than one from an '80s hair/metal band featuring keyboards, then I will never play air guitar alone in my dorm room again.
Sure, I may be the guy who interrupts your Economics 104 class with his Countdown cell phone ringer, but don't act like for a few seconds you feel like you couldn't conquer anything, even aggregate supply and demand graphs.
So while Patrick will try to tug at your heartstrings with his Little Engine that Could theme music, just remember: Be it at a basketball game or bocce ball tournament, when Countdown comes on, all you fellow rockers stand tall.
Of all the songs produced in the history of sports, or -dare I say -in the history of the world, none is more emotionally evocative than the final score to Rudy
arguably the finest sports movie ever made.
Enter Rudy Ruettiger, the smallest, most athletically untalented player to ever make the Notre Dame football squad, so the movie suggests. He stands in the tunnel with his vision focused solely on the field while his jumpy teammates slap his pads and tell him how great he is.
They believe it, too -a couple scenes back they all told coach to let Rudy play for them, because the insistent little guy has been taking their beatings with no reward for so long. And even before that, he had to work through trials of adversity that hindered his acceptance to Notre Dame.
An unsupportive family, dyslexia, low income, physical inferiority and a guy who needs a date accompany Rudy along his rocky road to eventual success. And now he stands in the tunnel before the last game of the season and watches as it all accumulates into one glorious moment.
¥Jerry Goldsmith was assigned to capture the essence of all of that in one song -an almost impossible feat, which, to his utmost credit, he accomplished. A symphonic ensemble with strings, horns and driving percussion elevate Rudy to a level that allows him to make the game-ending tackle over the chanting of his name by those in the stadium.
The crowd goes wild, and as Rudy points a finger high into the sky as his teammates carry him off the field, it's hard not to cry, or shout, or display a scene of emotion that's impossible to hold back after a song that compresses the feeling of a feature-length movie into a few short minutes. Try finding another song that can do that. 17
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Mark Shugar
