Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
The eccentric 19th-century philosopher put it best, “Without music, life would be a mistake.” Those were the words of Friedrich Nietzsche.
That holds true for all facets of our existence; a soundtrack makes a film, but sadly, most of our lives play out without orchestral accompaniment.
Sports, surprisingly, are an exception. Sports films are as well.
The instrumental theme of “Chariots of Fire” won many awards. Is there a more stirring soundtrack than “Rocky’s Theme” in Sylvester Stallone’s epic boxing series? Sometimes the music of Bill Conti in “Rocky” can change a scene with a single note. That’s powerful.
If there’s a more nostalgic opening to a film than that of coach Norman Dale, played by the late Gene Hackman, driving across the Indiana countryside on his way to Hickory in Hoosiers, I haven’t seen or heard it. The music is perfectly in lockstep with the nostalgic vision of 1950s America.
“The Natural” is another sports film with an extraordinary soundtrack. The sunlit silhouettes of Roy Hobbs, played by Robert Redford, and Iris Gaines, played by Glenn Close, set to the film’s theme song, are multi-sensory masterpieces of the filmmaker’s art.
If you can’t tell, I enjoy sports films.
Two that hit very close to this aging football player’s life came in “Remember the Titans” and in an unlikely connection to the gridiron, in “Field of Dreams.”
There is a montage in Titans where they are destroying their opponents on the field with vicious hits, spinning opposing running backs through the air, leveling defensive linemen in opposing jerseys, and generally wreaking havoc. It’s marvelous.
The song it’s set to, the Creedence Clearwater Revival Classic, “Up Around the Bend,” came out in 1970, but we played it in 1972, 73, and 74 in the tiny locker room at the old Wind River High School in Morton before home games.
Imagine 30 skinny farm boys huddled in a locker room listening to the tinny sounds of an 8-track tape player set on full volume to CCR before a ballgame. Those old portable 8-track units sometimes used eight D-cell batteries and weighed 10 pounds. Such was 1970s technology.
Another favorite came in “Field of Dreams”, as Ray Kinsella and Clarence Mann leave Chisholm, Minnesota, to head back to Ray’s Iowa farm, the Doobie Brothers light up the scene of them driving on an interstate highway with “China Grove.”
Yep, we listened to “China Grove” in the locker room as well.
Though our coaches didn’t put up with much, or anything for that matter, they didn’t care about the music in the pre-game locker room. Maybe they knew the power of music to motivate an athlete.
I don’t know how motivated we could have been, we were 2-6 my junior year and improved to just 3-5 as seniors.
Still, we had a soundtrack.
Jump ahead a few years, and I’m coaching in Lusk. We had a retired Trailways bus for athletic trips with reclining seats and a decent stereo system. On long treks back to Niobrara County from Burns, Pine Bluffs, Lingle, and Yoder, we often listened to KERM (Country Lovin’ Kerm) from Torrington.
If we had an afternoon game at Saratoga, Hanna or Medicine Bow, we listened to the Texas Trail “Game of the Week” on KERM, with broadcasts from Guernsey, Pine Bluffs, Burns or Southeast Goshen.
It made the miles disappear on brisk autumn evenings.
One afternoon after thumping Hanna, we were driving home through Medicine Bow when we spotted the Lingle-Ft. Laramie Doggers outside the Virginian Hotel. They’d just drilled Bow-Basin 55-8, but we’d beaten them earlier 14-6 and, in those days, only one team went to playoffs and that was Lusk.
The boys pulled out a boom box and played “Another Bites the Dust” at full volume as we drove by the Lingle team. We were greeted with two dozen middle fingers. Epic.
In Shoshoni, we often listened to the Wyoming Cowboys on the way home from late afternoon games in Lovell, Greybull, Basin, Byron, or Burlington.
Music once tied generations together. If you were a teenager in the 60s, you still relish the music of the era. If you grew up in the 1970s, that was still true. It was true until the early 80s as well.
An invention that hit the market in 1979 changed the generational unity forever. The Sony Walkman was introduced that year, and from then on, music became a solitary pastime. No more would a team sit together in a locker room or on a bus and listen to the same songs.
The ramifications of “individuality” versus playing for the team have only gotten worse since Sony introduced the personal sound system in the Walkman.
Kids who used to play for the name on the front of the jersey now only worry about the name on the back.
More parents want their son or daughter to be all-state than to play on a state championship team. It’s a sad state of affairs in America’s last bastion of honor, masculinity, and fair-play athletics.
It’s not fair to blame Sony for the demise of American society, but that marketed on the growing trend of “me first” and we’ve never recovered as a nation.
The only place you’ll find music and athletics still mixed in a team concept is during the pre-game at football and basketball games or during halftime.
My late friend Nancy Jones did it best at Wind River home football games in Pavillion. Nancy would play the best Motown, Creedence, and Bob Seger tunes you could imagine. I always praised her for her musical selections. Nancy was a musician herself, but as a child of the 60s, she knew great popular music too.
During one home game, when I was covering the Cougars and Rocky Mountain for Steve Peck’s Riverton Ranger, she called me out.
“This one’s for you, Mr. Tucker,” Nancy said.
Over the loudspeakers at Leroy Sinner Field came the strains of Diana Ross and the Supremes pounding out the saxophone-laden “Back in My Arms Again.”
If I’m a sports film cult member, I’m a Motown saxophone junky too. Nothing is better than a baritone sax wailing away on a song cut in the Motor City.
Buses full of football players, basketball players, wrestlers, or track athletes were once boisterous, noisy places where kids learned about each other and teams were made. Now they’re silent spaces filled with kids with headphones covering their ears, existing in their own little worlds.
I long for the old days, when the team was all that mattered and your role in it was the focus of almost every player.
Now that’s a soundtrack I could get behind.