Tag Team Is Still Having Fun
Each summer Sports Illustrated revisits, remembers and rethinks some of the biggest names and most important stories of our sporting past. This year’s WHERE ARE THEY NOW? crop features a Flying Fish and a Captain, jet packs and NFTs, the Commerce Comet and the Say Hey Kid. Come back all week for more.
The Magic City gentlemen’s club in Atlanta was already a landmark in the world of sports long before it made headlines last summer as the place Lou Williams stopped in for an order of wings outside the NBA bubble before being sent to quarantine for 10 days. In 1992, something was created there that changed the experience of going to a game—and then 28 years later it changed pandemic life in a strangely satisfying way.
That creation is, of course, “Whoomp! (There It Is).”
Recorded in the summer of 1992 and released the following year, the song spent nearly half of 1993 in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, peaking at No. 2, where it spent seven weeks. (Janet Jackson and UB40 kept it out of the top spot.) It sold four million copies. A version appeared on Disney’s Mickey Unrapped, and the song was remixed for an Addams Family movie.
The tune has legs. In 2013, a video of an umpire ringing up high school kids by bellowing, “Whoomp! There it Is!” on called third strikes went viral after former A’s pitcher Mark Mulder posted it to Instagram. In 2016, Cleveland first baseman Mike Napoli used it as his walkup song (he was far from the only player to do so). The team Cleveland faced in the World Series that year, the Chicago Cubs, used it as their home run celebration song.
As its Wikipedia page notes, simply, “People like the song.” (The claim is backed with two citations.)
But since its release in the early days of the first Clinton Administration, “Whoomp!” has never been more popular than it was at the tail end of one of the darkest years of American history.
Illustration by Tim McDonagh
You’ll be hard-pressed to find someone to say, “2020 has been the best year of my life,” but when Cecil Glenn—better known as DC the Brain Supreme, one half of Tag Team, the duo responsible for all this Whoomping—says it, you take him at his word. DC is unflailingly positive and earnest. When he explains why last year was so incredible, it’s hard not to be drawn in. The former DJ and current rapper has branched out in recent years into acting and voice work. “I promise you,” he says. “I shot two movies, three TV shows, tons of voiceover—and Geico.”
Late in the year, Glenn was contacted by the firm that handles the creative for the insurance company’s advertising campaigns. They had an idea. Tag Team helps out a family that’s making dinner. The punchline: Soup, there it is.
DC, as is his wont, jumped in with both feet. “I’m like, okay, now I’ve got to prepare,” he says. “Cause I’m in actor mode. And I’m scrolling through Seinfeld episodes, trying to find the soup Nazi episode, so I could just have [some inspiration].” Then the agency called back. They discovered an old Justin Timberlake Saturday Night Live sketch that made the same joke, so they were going to pivot to ice cream. For DC, it was a sign. “It took me back to my childhood with me and my brother, and my father used to make us ice cream,” he says. “He’d be like, ‘All right, I got the eggs, the sugar, the vanilla, the milk, go set it up.’ And we put the ice around it and we’d have a churn.”
That level of excitement sounds a little suspect, but there’s a sincerity that emanates from DC. He wanted the commercial to have the feel of a Tag Team show—nothing too serious, just fun. He and his partner, Steve Gibson—a.k.a. Steve Roll’n—shot the spot in one day during the middle of the pandemic. The director and creative team gave their feedback remotely.
DC is proud of what he brought to the shoot—specifically, tossing jimmies in the air as he yelled, “Sprinnnnkkkklllllleeesss,” an homage to LeBron James and his pregame chalk toss. He wanted to incorporate the Salt Bae (a dainty flick of the wrist that sends NaCl onto food), but the sprinkles wouldn’t land properly on the ice cream. At the end of the long shoot, DC was exhilarated. Steve was exhausted: “I’ve never danced that much.”
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It didn’t take long for the spot to blow up once it started airing—especially among sports fans. It seemed like it was on during every game, at every timeout. Roger Bennett of Men In Blazers did a shot-by-shot breakdown of the ad, calling it “a delirious daydream that belongs in the Smithsonian and has been one of the joys of lockdown for me.” (Highlight: pointing out the blue Le Creuset pot in the background and referring to it as “the symbol of pragmatic luxury.”) The Undefeated went deep on it. Since Christmas, it’s been viewed on YouTube more than 15 million times, which means approximately 77,000 times a day someone said, “I would really like to go to the trouble to watch an advertisement that I’ve already seen dozens of times and can probably see again if I just wait five minutes.”
Steve can’t quite put his finger on why people loved the spot so much, but DC has a simple theory: “I think it just reminded people what it was like to have a good time again.”
Martina Raddatz/Redferns/Getty Images
The song was written with a good time in mind. DC was spinning records at Magic City in the late 1980s and early ’90s, and the expression was something he heard time and again, a latter-day onomatopoeic shorthand for throw your hands in the air and wave ’em like you just don’t care. He decided it would be the perfect name for a song, so he told Steve, who produced the beats, to get on it.
The two had been partners since the early 1980s, when they met while attending Denver’s Manual High. Steve had a band, which DC, who had taken piano and trumpet lessons as a kid, talked his way into. Steve also rapped with his cousin Otis P in a duo they called Tag Team. DC convinced Steve to let him into that group as well. “He’s a persistent dude,” says Steve. When Otis left to join the army, the most famous Tag Team lineup was set.
After high school, Steve went to the Art Institute of Atlanta to study audio engineering, and DC went to Sacramento State, where he DJed frat parties when he wasn’t doing schoolwork. In the late ’80s, Steve called DC and told him they could have a musical future in Atlanta, so DC moved south. In 1990, Otis came to visit from Germany, and the three of them were in a club owned by Deion Sanders when a familiar song came on. “It was a record Otis used to break dance to in Texas,” says Steve. “He came back to Denver and lived with me and my mom and told me about the song, so I used to break dance to it, too.” It was called “I’m Ready” by Kano, and when Otis and Steve heard it in Club 21, something clicked. “That was our jam,” says Steve. “I told DC, ‘We’re going to use that some day.’”
That day came two years later, when DC had his Whoompiphany. The problem was that DC wanted the song to have a southern feel, to be a bass record, but Steve was into the West Coast sound. Eventually, they went with DC’s vision and Steve’s bass line, and created arguably the greatest jock jam of all time.
Al Pereira/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
The original attempt featured some of the performers from Magic City chipping in on the chorus, but Steve insisted on having friends and family chant the line instead. DC spun it at the club and the response was emphatic. “To this day,” he says, “that is the biggest response of any record that I’ve ever played.”
Magic City was a hot spot even then, decades before Williams had lemon pepper wings named in his honor. It was a revolving door of athletes and entertainers, including Ed Lover, the host of Yo! MTV Raps. He got his hand on a copy of the record, and in the summer of 1993 it took off, in part because of its video, which featured loads of people dancing, having a good time and occasionally dunking basketballs on a caged-in court.
The song quickly developed a connection with the sports world, thanks largely to the fact that it dropped at a time when in-game entertainment evolved from the occasional organ riff to massive spectacle. After the Bulls completed their first three-peat, they celebrated with the song at their parade in Grant Park. The Phillies used it as an anthem during their run to the National League pennant. The Saints adopted it as well. When the first volume of Jock Jams was released in 1995, “Whoomp!” was the third track, behind Michael Buffer’s exhorting the crowd to get ready to rumble and “Get Ready For This,” by 2 Unlimited.
Ironically, or perhaps not ironically, the song was released right around the same time as another song performed by a Southern band: “Whoot, There It Is,” by Miami bass outfit 95 South. Predictably, this led to mass confusion, especially in some of the country’s more august news outlets and organizations. The New York Times beamed “‘Whoomp!’ and ‘Whoot!’ [...] It’s the joyous cry of the streets” before proclaiming, “On Capitol Hill, where Congressmen are shadowboxing with the big issues of our time, you’ll get a dumbfounded stare if you happen to mention, ‘Whoot, there it is!’” The Phillies, who were clearly in the Whoomp! camp, nonetheless touted the wrong band—95 South—at a performance during the playoffs.
Al Pereira/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
The groups, however, had no beef with each other, each maintaining that the almost-identical phrases were born of coincidence; they were just the kinds of things you’d hear all the time in clubs down south. Tag Team and 95 South even appeared together on the Arsenio Hall Show to raise money for charity.
What followed is straight out of Behind the Music: yearslong lawsuits over samples and ownership, a bankrupt record label, changing musical tastes. There was never a follow-up hit. (That’s fine with the guys. “If you’re going to have one hit, man, that’s the one to have,” says DC.) The band never broke up, but they stopped recording in the late nineties. DC worked to keep Tag Team relevant, booking private gigs and wearing just about every hat imaginable. (In a 45-minute conversation he referred to himself as a rapper, DJ, P.R. rep, voice actor, actor, “tech guy” and “[search-engine optimization] guy.”) A few years back, after being told by bookers that there was no interest in a one-hit-wonder novelty act, he joined the International Entertainment Buyers Association, an industry group that books musical acts, and went to their convention, where he walked around in a “Whoomp! There It Is” T-shirt. “Me and Chubby Checker were the only black people out of 5,000 people,” he says. But he honed his pitch: a band with a clean earworm that everyone knew almost from birth, thanks to the Disney version, a Kidz Bop version and its appearance in loads of movies—including seasonal fare like Elf, guaranteeing millions of kids would hear it every Christmas season.
After Tag Team shot the Geico spot, DC says publicists weren’t sure what to do with the duo’s sudden upswing in popularity. How do you market an act that’s hot because of a commercial but can’t tour because of a pandemic? Kind of a novel problem. So DC did what he always does: “I joined an organization or association or society.” In this case, it was the Public Relations Society of America. DC’s handling much of the group’s P.R. led to loads of podcast appearances and some more gigs. They were the grand marshals of a NASCAR race in Talladega. They played halftime of Game 1 of the NBA’s Western Conference finals. A few live shows are scheduled for the summer.
Will the exposure lead to bigger things? DC has his film work, including #MyCorona, a meta romantic comedy set—and filmed—in the pandemic. He’s also working hard on his voice acting, which he first got interested in back in the 1990s, when he had to teach Minnie Mouse how to rap. Steve, meanwhile, is taking a course in mastering. “The ride is unpredictable, man,” Steve says. “But hopefully something else comes out of this. I know DC is going to be a big actor one day. I know that. And hopefully, with my mastering I can sit back in my studio and put things together for people to sound good. So hopefully I’m successful in that and be successful in this voiceover and acting. Whatever comes with Tag Team comes. We aren’t breaking up. We ain’t going nowhere. We are gonna always be here.”
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