Leitmotif / Sports

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• Fight sports like Boxing and Mixed Martial Arts usually followed the Professional Wrestling example where a fighter's entrance is accompanied with a song. While most fighters usually used different songs for their entrance, some fighters would usually end up being associated with one particular song.
  • Darude's "Sandstorm" (for Wanderlei Silva)
  • DMX's "Intro" (for Chuck Liddell)
• In the US at least, many high schools and colleges have fight songs and official hymns. Most Americans are probably at least passingly familiar with the Notre Dame fight song as an audio shorthand for college football, especially if they have ever seen Rudy. They may also be familiar with the tune of the Notre Dame Fight Song if they recall junior-high algebra, since some math teachers set the quadratic formula to the tune of that fight song to make it easier to remember.
• Most point to the 1990s Chicago Bulls for starting the "NBA teams with theme songs" as they would play "Sirius" by The Alan Parsons Project before each home game, a tradition that continues today.
• Baseball players playing in their home stadium, whether pitchers coming from the bullpen (especially likely with closers) or batters, will frequently have the P.A. blasting a song they pick to get the crowd psyched up.
  • San Diego Padres and Milwaukee Brewers closer Trevor Hoffman and AC/DC's "Hells Bells", the first big league player to have a leitmotif.
  • Yankee Stadium will erupt when the opening riff of Metallica's "Enter Sandman" plays. They know that relief pitcher Mariano Rivera is coming into the game, and much like Hoffman's appearance, this typically meant the game was over. Billy Wagner had the same song played from his days with the Houston Astros.
  • Edwin Diaz has "Narco" by Blasterjaxx and Timmy Trumpet. He initially adopted it in 2018 when he was with the Seattle Mariners. He was then traded to the New York Mets and changed walkout songs, but that coincided with a catastrophic stretch of blown saves in 2019, to the point of UrinatingTree nicknaming him "Edlose Diaz", so he switched back in 2020. His performance rebounded after that and he became one of the best closers in the game, while the song gained popularity among Mets fans.
  • In contrast to the high-energy "walk-up music" used by most baseball players, starting in May 2014, then-Oakland Athletics outfielder Josh Reddick chose "Careless Whisper" by George Michael. The fans seem to approve.
• "You'll Never Walk Alone" from Carousel has primarily been affiliated with Liverpool FC, though many other football clubs around the world have also taken to it.
• NHL teams both have individual goal horn sound when the home team scores as well as a goal song that plays right after to get the crowd excited. While teams can end up changing their song from season to season for various reasons, sometimes one particular song will have staying power with a team and it ends up sticking in hockey fans' minds:
  • The Chicago Blackhawks have all but made their goal song, The Fratellis' "Chelsea Dagger", this.
  • Rather than using an existing hit song, the New York Rangers have the purpose-written "Slapshot" for goals scored at home since 1995.
  • The Vegas Golden Knights use "Vegas Lights" by Las Vegas-based Panic! at the Disco.
• Sometimes a team's specific season will end up having a theme song associated with it, especially if the team's season was a memorable championship.
  • The 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates have the disco hit "We Are Family" by Sister Sledge, using it to come back from a 3–1 deficit against the Baltimore Orioles to win the World Series.
  • The 2018–19 St. Louis Blues have "Gloria" as covered by Laura Branigan. The Blues were having a terrible season and had nothing going for them, having already fired their coach in November and were in last place on January 6 when they were in Philadelphia for a game. A few Blues players were at a local bar watching football when they kept hearing some local patrons yelling at the DJ to "Play 'Gloria'!" over and over and seeing a bunch of guys dancing around having fun, so they figured "eh, why not try that?" after every win from that point on. The Blues won their game against the Philadelphia Flyers 3-0, starting a most remarkable turnaround where they began rocketing up the standings (highlighted by a franchise-record 11 wins in a row along the way), into the playoffs, and all the way to the franchise's first Stanley Cup championship in its 52-year history.
  • The 2019 Washington Nationals started out their year with poor expectations, having lost their star outfielder Bryce Harper to the Philadelphia Phillies on a massive $400 million contract as a free agent the previous offseason; by late May their record after 50 games was a terrible 19-31. Outfielder Gerardo Parra was himself in a batting slump when he decided to change his walk-up music in June to...the children's song "Baby Shark", of all things (his two-year-old daughter loved the song). Parra hit a homer the first day he used it and decided to stick with it, and fans began to do the arm-clapping shark bite motions at every home game while players began to incorporate it into a team celebration after a home run. It contributed to a major turnaround for the team both in terms of morale and performance, as the Nationals finished the regular season with a 93-69 record and clinched a Wild Card spot in the playoffs, where they went on a run that culminated in the franchise's first ever World Series victory (including all their time as the Montreal Expos since 1969 until 2004) and Washington's first since 1924.
  • blink-182's "All the Small Things" started becoming associated with the Colorado Avalanche because the arena's DJ heard it on the way to a game and decided to play it at said game. Fans quickly embraced it and started singing along, even singing the rest of the song after play began, and would ride that momentum all the way to the 2022 Stanley Cup. blink-182 would congratulate the Avs in response, and Mark Hoppus would attend the banner ceremony to lead the fans in one more sing-along.
• John Williams wrote the Olympic Fanfare and Theme, which was used in several Olympiads in the 1990s and 2000s.

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