Inside Michigan’s ‘One Shining Moment’ — and the song’s epic origin
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The ball is tipped
And there you are
You’re running for your life
You’re a shooting star
The Michigan Wolverines were on the basketball-court-turned-celebration-stage, covered in confetti and hugs. That’s when the first notes hit. The opening sounds of the song that everyone in Lucas Oil Stadium had been waiting on. Especially the just-crowned 2026 men’s college basketball national champions.
As the Michigan players, coaches and their families draped their arms over one another and watched the highlights of the title run set to “One Shining Moment,” a hundred yards away on the front row of Section 111, a group of Wolverines fans watched the big screen too. No one noticed the married couple sitting among them, singing along to every word and misty-eyed while they did it. David and Tracy Barrett of Ann Arbor. Tracy is a Michigan graduate. David, a Michigan native, wrote the song.
And all the years
No one knows
Just how hard you worked
But now it shows
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 as Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics ran 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 said 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.”
Well, was she?
“No, she was rather busy.”
No offense to Barrett, but we should all be thankful that she had more critical tasks than posting up at the bar to admire the singer’s basketball spoken word. Because it was within that space of lonely time that, inspired by his own lesson about moments, he scribbled three words onto a cocktail napkin. The following morning, he expanded those words into a chorus, this time onto a stack of napkins at a brunch spot, The Knight Cap Too.
In one shining moment,
it’s all on the line
One shining moment,
there frozen in time
For nearly 40 years, those lyrics and the tune Barrett wrote to accompany them have been the soundtrack of our college basketball lives.
“There are so many moments that make up a championship celebration,” said Mike Krzyzewski, who won five national titles as Duke’s 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,” added 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.”
“You also don’t just watch it if you win it,” said Tom Izzo, who celebrated with Michigan State in 2000. “If you are there at the game, you wait to see it. If you are home on the sofa, you wait to see it. The season isn’t done until you hear that song.”
Mike Krzyzewski watches “One Shining Moment” alongside the 2009-10 Duke Blue Devils — the fourth of five national championship teams he coached. AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill, File
And to think, the NFL almost intercepted it right out from under college basketball’s nose.
For that moment, let’s go back to 1986. 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.
Keteyian told Barrett that if he got the song recorded, he’d love to hear it.
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 said. “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, California, 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.
“He said they wanted to use it for March Madness,” Barrett’s voice nearly exploded as he told the story. “So, my little song about basketball, you know what? It figured out a way to make sure it was still a basketball song.”
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 and cued, ready to play.
Once again, it was Musburger who did the lead-in honors. And this time it aired.
“The idea of the song, that one moment can change everything. Well, that’s what happened to me in that moment,” said Barrett, who has since composed themes for CBS, ABC and PBS, melodic backdrops for the Olympics, US Open tennis, the PGA Championship and a documentary about C.S. Lewis. He has won two Emmys.
His go-to joke now is to say: “After all those years, suddenly I had talent!”
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.
Vandross laid down his vocals in winter 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.
Even in the 2021 NCAA tournament bubble, “One Shining Moment” was a highlight for the Baylor Bears, who won that season’s title. Jamie Squire/Getty Images
It has been Luther’s song ever since, with the exception of 2010, when Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson’s rendition was beloved for its sound but criticized because the internet claimed it was imbalanced, with too much of her and not enough college basketball. (At 3:12, it’s only a few seconds longer than average, and Hudson is featured for a total of about eight seconds.)
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
