Ryan McGeeApr 5, 2026, 07:59 PM ETCloseSenior writer for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com 2-time Sports Emmy winner 2010, 2014 NMPA Writer of the Year Follow on XMultiple Authors
Braylon Mullins’ dagger 3 sends UConn to its third title game in 4 years (0:16)Braylon Mullins’ dagger 3 sends UConn to its third title game in four years. (0:16)
David Barrett was sitting in a bar when the idea came to him. The 31-year-old musician had spent his entire young adult life grinding as a performer in the watering holes of Michigan. College bars. Dive bars. Even the occasional honky tonk. On this particular spring night in 1986, it was an East Lansing establishment known as the Varsity Inn and his set — a performance heard by perhaps two dozen patrons — was done.
Barrett was unwinding over a drink. With one eye he watched the TV over the bar, watching Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics running over another unfortunate NBA opponent. His other eye was affixed on the woman who had served him that drink.
“The waitress was so beautiful, I thought, well, I’m a songwriter, so perhaps my only chance to catch her attention was through poetry,” Barrett says today. “If I could express to her the poetry of Larry Bird’s abilities at the height of his career, this special moment in his life creating so many special moments on the court, perhaps she would be impressed.”
“There are so many moments that make up a championship celebration,” explains Mike Krzyzewski, who won five national titles as Duke’s head coach. “There’s the moment the game ends. There’s hugging your family. There’s cutting down the nets. The moment of being handed the trophy. But the moment it feels real is when they play ‘One Shining Moment.'”
“It’s this literal life-flashing-before-your-eyes thing, watching that video set to that song,” adds John Calipari, who won it all with Kentucky in 2012. “It’s like watching a movie of your life, that you wrote, with the people who wrote it with you.”
For that moment, let’s go back to ’86. That’s when Barrett met sports reporter Armen Keteyian. Keteyian, like Barrett, was a native of the Detroit area and had moved to New York to write for Sports Illustrated. Whenever Barrett went East, he’d stay at Keteyian’s apartment. During one of those visits, the two were watching the NBA Finals on TV — Larry Bird again, doing work against the Houston Rockets — and Barrett mentioned his basketball song from the napkins.
A few weeks later, a cassette was waiting in Keteyian’s mailbox, tracks laid down in a make-do studio used for local advertising jingles. The reporter loved it, so he walked the tape over to a colleague in TV production.
“One day my phone rang and the gentleman on the other end said he was Doug Towey and he was the creative director at CBS Sports,” Barrett recalls now, his throat catching to hold back tears. “Of course, I didn’t believe him at first. He sounded like a buddy of mine pulling a prank. But over the next 15 minutes, I made a friend for life over a phone call that changed my life.”
Towey, a sports television legend — the theme music for The Masters, the iconic CBS Sports college sports themes, you name it and Towey was probably behind it — had fallen in love with the song and told Barrett that he really, really wanted to use it for … Super Bowl XXI?
“Yes, it was a basketball song, but you know what you do not do in that situation?” Barrett says. “You do not say no to CBS. Why yes, Doug Towey, please use my song for the Super Bowl!”
CBS even flew Barrett out to Pasadena to watch the matchup between John Elway’s Denver Broncos and Lawrence Taylor’s New York Giants. During his postgame report, sportscaster Brent Musburger even quoted the song. “The New York Giants, their first Super Bowl triumph, a shining moment they will never forget…” The time had arrived. Barrett’s big break was happening!
But it never ran. The Super Bowl-winning Giants were a little too chatty in their postgame locker room interviews, so the broadcast ran long, and time ran out. Barrett was crushed — until a second call from Towey.
On March 30, 1987, “One Shining Moment” made its debut in the most perfectly shiny momentous manner.
Indiana’s Keith Smart had stroked a drifting corner jump shot with four seconds remaining to defeat Syracuse for the championship. CBS Sports editors scrambled to add nine shots from that game to the end of the montage they had already pieced together throughout the month. The seventh of those images was Smart’s dagger.
From a clunky makeshift video edit room next to the CBS production truck in the bowels of the Superdome, the instant those shots were added, the videotape was popped and sprinted by hand via a panicked young producer to the end of that truck, where tape machines had just spent hours turning around instant replays and interview clips for the telecast. It got crammed into one of those machines, cued, and ready to play.
Vandross laid down his vocals in the winter of 2002, captured by CBS cameras to be intercut with the hoops highlights in true music video fashion. The following spring Vandross suffered a massive stroke that forever altered his voice, meaning that “One Shining Moment” was the final song recorded by the legendary artist.
“We have a dedicated team that travels to the Final Four. They are on site,” explains Drew Watkins, SVP and Creative Director of TNT Sports, from the sprawling TV production compound that sits outside the south gate of Lucas Oil Stadium.
Watkins has been with TNT since 2000; before that he was an entry-level producer at ESPN. On Monday night, he will be keeping an eye on his on-site producer and editor, George Adams and Chris Vining.
There will actually be two edit suites running simultaneously, just in case. Because all it takes is one power outage, one video glitch or one computer deciding that it’s a great time for a restart, to turn the dream of Barrett’s song into one nightmare moment. Redundancy is a producer’s best friend. No one wants to be the person who ended a four-decade streak of making air.
“The good news is that we have backups in place,” Watkins said. “The better news is that nobody’s having to pop a tape and run it across a parking lot anymore.”
Meanwhile, the viewing of “One Shining Moment” as it airs on the arena’s big screen always feels downright intimate, even on a tiny basketball floor situated in the center of a 70,000-seat NFL stadium-turned-basketball gym.
On Monday night, the man who brought us the song will be right there with them. Because it’s his favorite part, too: David Barrett’s literal “One Shining Moment.”
“People ask me all the time which ‘One Shining Moment’ is my favorite one to watch, but I can’t answer that. That’s impossible,” he said on Saturday morning as he prepared to attend the semifinal games with his wife, Tracy. (No, she’s not the waitress from East Lansing, though that server, Jan Shoemaker, and Barrett were eventually reunited through a mutual friend.)
Tracy is a Michigan alum, and she and David still live in the Detroit area, where they raised two girls. As soon as they arrived in Indianapolis, they purchased some Block M Final Four gear before they witnessed the Wolverines’ devastation of the Arizona Wildcats to officially become the favorites to win the national title.
Since that night, CBS Sports and now TNT have aired 38 editions of “One Shining Moment” performed by four different singers. Barrett himself did the honors over the first seven editions before Towey recruited Philadelphia soul legend Teddy Pendergrass for a new version. Bennett’s vocals returned in 2000, along with a bluesier overhaul of the tune. Two years after that, Barrett received another call from Towey, asking how he’d feel if Luther Vandross were to give the song a spin. Barrett said of course and asked when it would happen. Towey, clearly having already made up his mind before the call, told Barrett that Vandross was slated to be in the studio that very night.
Screening all 38 editions of “One Shining Moment” (thanks, Internet!) is a history lesson not just on college basketball, but television production. Grainy standard definition video transitions into 4K HD as majestically as the images of 1980s feathered hairstyles morph into low burst fades. The production process has evolved not unlike the game being played on the floor of the arena. Digitized and fast-paced, with the ability to be nimble on the fly like UConn and Michigan on the break. But the spirit of how it is pieced together hasn’t changed at all.
Braylon Mullins’ dagger 3 sends UConn to its third title game in 4 years (0:16)Braylon Mullins’ dagger 3 sends UConn to its third title game in four years. (0:16)
Ryan McGeeApr 5, 2026, 07:59 PM ETCloseSenior writer for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com 2-time Sports Emmy winner 2010, 2014 NMPA Writer of the Year Follow on XMultiple Authors
CloseSenior writer for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com 2-time Sports Emmy winner 2010, 2014 NMPA Writer of the Year Follow on X
The ball is tipped And there you are You’re running for your life You’re a shooting star
And all the years No one knows Just how hard you worked But now it shows
In one shining moment, it’s all on the line One shining moment, there frozen in time
And to think, the NFL almost intercepted it right out from under college basketball’s nose.
Keteyian told Barrett that if he got the song recorded, he’d love to hear it.
Once again, it was Musburger who did the lead-in honors. And this time it aired.
His go-to joke now is to say: “After all those years, suddenly I had talent!”
“They’re in one of our edit trucks and are linked in with the studio and the game production truck,” Watkins says of how it will all go down as the clock ticks down on the title game. “So, when we’re editing those plays, and we’re filling in those last few moments and winners are being decided and ‘One Shining Moment’ is minutes away from airing, there is a team on site in the TV compound that is putting those shots together, talking to the broadcast trucks to make sure everything is on track.”