Cover via Amazon
Extreme singing anyone? Maybe popping a neck ligament while belting power ballads can now be classified as a sports injury.
Sports and music go together like quarterbacks and cheerleaders. That’s why I’m starting off with the much-acclaimed cheerleading saga “Bring It On”. From the pre-credits sequence to the training montage sequences to the final competition, this film comes as close to perfection as possible. As far as I’m concerned, there have been very few moments where we get to experience that perfect marriage between sports, music, and cinema. And they’re all in “Bring It On”. Too bad the available soundtrack album doesn’t do justice to the gamut of music featured in the actual movie. It’s a major travesty that the two climactic cheer themes weren’t included, at the very least. But listening to cheer music is only half as cool without the perky visuals anyway. And “Bring It On” is worth experiencing in Progressive Scan High Definition and Extended Surround Sound Plus. If only for the extended version Toni Basil’s immortal cheer classic “Mickey”.
Ok, for those on a more “classical” bent, there are other great sports movie soundtracks. Baseball may seem to be the sport that lends itself easily to cinematic musical metaphors and bringing out a guy’s sensitive side. Right before he went on to work exclusively for Pixar, Randy Newman hit one right out of the park with his moving, evocative score for the Robert Redford baseball tear-jerker “The Natural”. James Horner’s “Field Of Dreams” score was a stirring home run as well.
Cover of Brian’s Song
“Brian’s Song” was the smash 1971 TV movie starring James Caan and Billy Dee Williams, that tells the story of Chicago Bears football player Brian Piccolo, his friendship with teammate Gale Sayers, and struggle with terminal cancer. The film struck such a chord that it got a theatrical release, a remake in 2001, and is considered one of the top “makes-men-cry” movies. The musical theme to Brian’s Song, “The Hands of Time,” composed by Michel Legrand, with lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman, also hit it big.
Cover of Ice Castles: Original Soundtrack Album
On the other hand, what could be more girly (or gay) than ice skating? The 1980 movie Ice Castles wrung out a tender, tearjerking love story from the stirring whirl of Olympic Competition Skating. But it was its theme, the song “Looking through the Eyes of Love”, written by Marvin Hamlisch & Carole Bayer Sager and originally performed by Melissa Manchester, that struck gold, and continues to be a staple in other competitive sports such as talent contests, beauty pageants, and weddings.
Chariots of Fire (instrumental) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Who else starts humming the melody that goes “tun tun tun tun tun… tun… tun tun tun tun tun…” whenever they go running? Footage of sprinters in slow motion was never the same again after the world first got a listen to the synthesized stylings of Vangelis’s Academy Award-winning “Chariots of Fire” soundtrack in 1981. A master of the Moog who was once asked to join the prog-rock band Yes, the Greek composer Vangelis crafted, in Chariot’s main “Titles” theme, a magnificent symphony to exertion, grace, and victory.
200 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
John Williams also took a shot at this goal by composing the Theme and Fanfare for the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. The usual bombastic Williams style goes on to win a Grammy Award and becomes one of the best known (and frequently borrowed) musical themes for any Olympic Games.
Not to be left out, we Pinoys can unabashedly belt out our homegrown arena anthems with the best of them. These include the Sex Bomb dancers’ imaginative “Basketball” and Manny Pacquiao’s vanity track Para Sa ‘yo Ang Laban Na ‘To. Maybe in the next Olympics videoke could be one of the new sports in competition. That might just give us our best chances for a gold medal. But win or lose, we’ll do… what we have to do… and do it… our way…
-text by Jude Defensor, some rights reserved. first published under music column Crash Chords in Manual magazine, 2006
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