SINGING IN THE REIGN
Queen biopic puts spotlight back on anthem of ‘Champions’
AS WITH so many things that have happened at the confluence of sports and popular culture across the last 40 years, we can offer credit — or assign blame — to those oh-so-chipper basketball fans who inhabit the residence halls and fraternity houses at Duke University for coming up with the idea.
It seems that on the evening of Monday, March 27, 1978, moments after Kentucky had won the NCAA basketball championship by holding off the upstart Dookies of Jim Spanarkel and Mike Gminski, 94-88, in St. Louis, an impromptu consolation party broke out back home on the Duke campus.
Fifteen kegs of free beer were wheeled into the campus’ central quadrangle. Firecrackers exploded. A blimp floated overhead with an electronic message that fired up the students: “DOWN WITH KENTUCKY — DUKE NO. 1!” The students began to chant: “Duke Next Year! Duke Next Year!” A live band began to tune its instruments for a spontaneous concert.
Then someone opened up a window, cranked a stereo to 11, and a musical message spilled out into the North Carolina night:
And seconds later, for the what is believed to be the first time ever, a chorus rang out in perfect harmony with a sporting moment:
“We are the champions, my friend!
And we’ll keep on fighting to the end!
We are the champions, WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS!
No time for losers, ’cause we are the champions …
Of the world …
Of course … the fact that Duke, technically, wasn’t the champion is beside the point. And a year later, St. John’s would shoo the Blue Devils out of the tournament early, so even the prophetic irony of the song was all wrong.
Still, something was hatched as that long night eased into an early morning in Durham, N.C. Queen had risen as high as No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts on Feb. 4 of ’78 with the double-sided dual anthem, “We Will Rock You/ We Are The Champions,” and it was still clinging on the chart at No. 96 when Goose Givens dropped 41 on the Devils in the Checkerdome to halt Duke’s Cinderella run.
This week, the Queen biopic movie “Bohemian Rhapsody” made its long-awaited premiere in the UK, and next week it opens here, and so you can be sure to hear Freddie Mercury up and down your radio dial and all over your television again the next few weeks. Queen is a classic radio staple and most of their hits, from “Another One Bites the Dust” to “Under Pressure,” have never really gone away.
But “We Are the Champions” has had a special kind of staying power. Sports in the late ’70s was slowly making a sea change in its in-game operations away from the classic organ music that dominated most of its history and toward rock music blaring over its PA systems. And as that happened, just about every team that has clinched a championship at home in the 40 years since has had chosen for them the No. 1 song on the posttitle playlist.
“I think it’s a great song with an a bsolutely killer chorus,” Queen’s guitarist, Brian May, told “Billboard” last September. “It’s very triumphal. It fits the occasion, whatever the occasion might be. We weren’t aiming at sports arenas, but we’ll take it.” And it is hard to escape. “One of my favorites was when I went to see the Chicago Bulls versus the Lakers, and you had Michael Jordan going against Magic Johnson and that was outrageous to see,” May said. “I just smiled a lot.”
The Elias Sports Bureau does not keep records on such matters, but if it seems fair to credit Duke with hatching the four-decade affair between champions and “Champions,” it seems we can give legitimate credit to one of our own with actually consummating the marriage.
For within seconds of Bobby Nystrom taking a pass from John Tonelli 7 minutes, 11 seconds into overtime on May 24, 1980, beating Pete Peeters and giving the Islanders a 5-4 win over the Flyers for their first Stanley Cup, it finally happened.
Denis Potvin was taking his first triumphant tour of the Nassau Coliseum ice, the 14,995 folks in the old barn were going berserk, so it was impossible to hear Mercury’s first piano cords, or the first few verses, but by the time the chorus arrived, everyone joined in …
And an eternal secular sacrament was born.
Funny thing, too? The Islanders, e like Duke, had jumped the gun on all of this. Back on May 8, 1978 — with Queen’s song still on o the radio, but off the charts — that song had rang out of the Coliseum speakers after the Isles polished off the Rangers, 7-2, to win the first Patrick Division in franchise history, igniting a raucous celebration.
Exactly four weeks later, as the Islanders prepared to host the Maple Leafs in Game 7 of the NHL quarterfinals, that song played again — but during warmups. The Isles were a model expansion team and generally did everything right — but that one ticked off the hockey gods something fierce, and they lost that game in overtime on a Lanny MacDonald goal.
Afterward, Potvin raged, “That [bleeping] song never gets [bleeping] played again until it [bleeping] means something!”
Two years later, it would. In fact, “We Are the Champions” became something akin to the NCAA’s “One Shining Moment” in the early ’80s, since the Islanders clinched three of their four Cups at home, and so it was an annual rite of spring that Potvin would take the Cup for a spin while Mercury sang, “I’ve taken my bows … and my curtain calls …”
“Whenever I hear that song,” Nystrom said a few years ago, as they were locking up the old version of the Coliseum for good, “it puts a smile on my face.”
Champions of all sports and all stripes have had the same feeling for 40 years and counting. And probably will forever.