Before the Bulls Built a Dynasty, They Built a Show
Illinovation: The Reboot. Post No. 1.
The Lights Go Out in 1977
It’s April 8, 1977, inside Chicago Stadium. The Bulls are scrapping for a playoff spot, playing against the Houston Rockets, and somebody in the front office has decided that tonight, the normal starting lineup announcement simply will not cut it.
So they’ve brought in a special electrician. An actual guy, hired specifically to shut off the lights in a giant old arena. On purpose. During an event people paid to attend.
The plan: kill the house lights, hit the Bulls with a spotlight, and announce each starter one by one while the building sits in darkness.
The announcer that night is a radio guy named Tommy Edwards, and according to his later recollection, he is not standing there thinking “I am about to change sports entertainment forever.” He is thinking “I hope I have enough light to read my script.”
The lights go out anyway. The introduction begins.
And here’s the part that breaks people’s brains: this happened in 1977.
The Chicago Bulls ended up winning the game, 113 – 109. They would go on to beat the Clippers on April 10 with a 120 – 99 win. They lost 2 games to 1 to the Trailblazers; but the city has eloquently named that late-season win-streak and post-season berth as the Miracle at the Madhouse on Madison.
Michael Jordan was fourteen years old. “Sirius” didn’t exist yet. Ray Clay wasn’t the announcer. The championships were more than a decade away. The most famous pregame ritual in basketball history was born while the Bulls were, respectfully, kind of mid.
Which raises the actual question of this whole article:
What does a sports team sell when it can’t promise you the team will win? Or that the game will even be good?
The Bulls figured out an answer. They couldn’t control the result.
They could control the entrance.
The Empty-Arena Problem
Let’s talk about the deeply unglamorous business reality behind the goosebumps.
Professional sports has a product problem that almost no other industry tolerates. A team cannot guarantee a win. It can’t guarantee a close game, a dramatic finish, or even a watchable performance. You’re buying a ticket to Something Happening, and Something might be terrible.
The late-70s and early-80s Bulls were selling exactly that. Basketball, with zero assurances the basketball would be worth your gas money.
The receipts are rough. In the 1983-84 season, the Bulls averaged roughly 6,365 fans per home game. Chicago Stadium held around 18,000 for basketball. That’s a building operating at about a third of capacity, which is less “electric home-court atmosphere” and more “sparsely attended school assembly.”
And before anyone says “well then Jordan showed up and fixed it”: babe, even Michael Jordan’s first home game did not sell out. The franchise’s famous sellout streak didn’t start until November 1987. Winning fixed attendance. Winning, marketing, TV exposure, and a generational superstar. The light show did not single-handedly save the box office, and we’re not going to pretend it did.
There was also a pettier, funnier problem. According to Bulls staffer David Rosengard, fans routinely showed up 15 to 20 minutes after tipoff. The opening minutes of every game were played in front of empty seats and dead air. Imagine being a professional athlete running out for the opening tip to the energy of a library.
So the front office did some math. The game lasts 48 minutes. Fans are in the building for over two hours. The team couldn’t manufacture a win, but it could absolutely shape everything else about the night.
The Bulls didn’t set out to reinvent sports entertainment. They were trying to keep the beginning of the night from feeling empty.
How Edwards and the Bulls Built the System
Before 1977, a starting lineup introduction was basically a verbal spreadsheet. Position, name, maybe a height, maybe a college. Information delivered, moving on.
What the Bulls started building was a sequence. Darkness. A spotlight. Deliberate pacing. Players entering one at a time. Pauses built in for the crowd to lose it. A buildup toward a final name. The announcement stopped being information and became a performance with an actual emotional arc.
Now, the myth-busting portion of our program, because this is Illinovation and we don’t do hagiography here.
Was this the first lights-out introduction in NBA history? Tommy Edwards later said that as far as he knew, no NBA team had ever killed the lights for a lineup intro before. The April 8, 1977 date is solid. The “first in league history” claim is his honest recollection, not a verified league-wide survey. So the responsible version is: this is the earliest documented Bulls example, and it may have been the NBA’s first. We’re keeping the “may.”
Also, the whole thing was held together with tape and anxiety. Chicago Stadium’s lights couldn’t just flip back on. Full illumination took real recovery time, and staff worried about fire safety and visibility. Head coach Jerry Sloan reportedly hated the idea because he figured the drama might fire up the opposing team just as much as the Bulls. Innovation rarely arrives to unanimous applause. Usually it arrives to a coach going “absolutely not” and getting overruled.
Here’s where Tommy Edwards earns his flowers, properly attributed.
Edwards came from WLS radio, which means he arrived with a very specific skill set: an ear for recorded music, an instinct for timing and transitions, comfort with cartridge-based audio playback, and years of practice riding a voice over a track. He wasn’t a stadium announcer who dabbled in music. He was a radio professional who treated a basketball arena like a broadcast.
His fingerprints are all over the details you already know. The elongated “Aaaand now.” The phrase “the man in the middle.” Contemporary recorded music instead of a wheezing organ. Custom pacing per player. He even played music for the visiting team’s intros, which is honestly a little unhinged for the era.
But, and this matters, Edwards was the principal architect of the sound. He was not a lone genius conjuring the whole spectacle from nothing. Marketers decided the audience problem was worth solving. Executives signed off on the weird experiments. Electricians and stadium staff made the blackout physically possible. Promotions people built the rest of the night around it. Edwards built the sonic language. The show required an organization.
And the famous version did not arrive fully formed. The Bulls tinkered for years. Live organ. Contemporary rock. “Thriller.” The Miami Vice theme. Different lighting setups, different games, different levels of commitment. Official Bulls history puts the nightly lights-out ritual around 1985, a full eight years after the original experiment.
Read that timeline again. Eight years of an old arena, a radio cartridge, a spotlight, and a bunch of people watching crowd reactions and adjusting. No analytics dashboard. No focus groups. Just Midwestern tinkering until the ritual worked.
Nobody announced a revolution. They just kept fixing the show.
“Sirius,” Jordan, and the Mythology Machine
Time for the song. You know the song. Your body involuntarily knows the song.
“Sirius” was written by Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson as the instrumental opener to Eye in the Sky, released in 1982. It was not written for basketball. It does not mention Chicago. It has no lyrics, which turned out to be its superpower, because nothing competes with the announcer. It starts quiet, adds layers, builds anticipation, and delays its payoff. It is, structurally, a lineup introduction that happens to be a song.
How it got to the Bulls is genuinely one of the best “wait, really?” stories in this whole series. Edwards later recalled hearing it playing as ambient music at the Biograph Theater in Chicago. He liked it, practiced announcing the Bulls over it, and transferred it to a cartridge for the arena. The most famous piece of sonic branding in American sports was discovered because a radio guy went to the movies.
Now the part where I ruin a tidy story, because that’s the brand.
The neat version you’ll see repeated everywhere says “Sirius” debuted at Jordan’s first home game, October 26, 1984. Cute date. Great symmetry. Problem: the evidence doesn’t back it up. Some later accounts give that exact date, but Edwards’s own more detailed recollection says the Bulls used “Thriller” first, messed around with the Miami Vice theme, and landed on “Sirius” afterward. No production sheet, game report, or recording has ever nailed down the actual debut.
So the honest version is this: “Sirius” entered the show during the early Jordan era, probably after the “Thriller” and Miami Vice experiments, and its exact first night remains unresolved. The song did not arrive sounding like basketball. Chicago trained the world to hear it that way, one repetition at a time.
Which brings us to Jordan, and the correction this article exists to make.
Michael Jordan did not create the Bulls intro. The darkness, the spotlight, the cadence, the whole experimental apparatus predates him by seven years. What Jordan did was make the show believable.
The Bulls put him last in the lineup, and suddenly the sequence had genuine narrative structure. Set the scene. Introduce the supporting cast. Build the tension. Withhold the guy everyone came to see. Release the crowd.
The show had always promised that someone important was coming. For years, that was marketing. Then Jordan kept walking out and being the promise. Every 40-point night retroactively justified every dramatic pause.
And then the flywheel kicked in. The intro made Jordan feel mythic. Jordan’s play made the intro feel earned. Winning cranked the crowd. The crowd made better television. Television taught millions of people who’d never set foot in Chicago what those opening synth notes meant. Familiarity made the next intro hit even harder.
Jordan himself described getting chills during it. Opposing players remembered it as flat-out intimidating. Though, worth noting, some participants insisted the whole thing only worked because the team was winning, which is the kind of honest buzzkill this series respects.
The intro did not create the dynasty. The dynasty took an effective local ritual and turned it into mythology.
Clay, WGN, and the Global Bulls
Quick history correction, because the wrong guy usually gets the credit.
Tommy Edwards left the Bulls in 1990. A new announcer named Ray Clay inherited the format just in time for, and I cannot stress this enough, the entire dynasty. Six championships. Two three-peats. National broadcasts, highlight reels, commercials, documentaries. If you’ve heard the Bulls intro, you’ve almost certainly heard Ray Clay’s voice.
Which is why everyone assumes he invented it. He didn’t, and to his credit, Clay has repeatedly said so himself, pointing back to Edwards as the originator.
What Clay added was performance. More volume, a more aggressive cadence, that gloriously stretched pronunciation, and rock-solid consistency through the most-watched years in franchise history. The cleanest way to hand out credit goes like this: Edwards built the sonic language. Clay delivered its most famous performance. Jordan supplied the central character. The championships gave it global reach.
But none of that leaves Chicago without a distribution system, and the Bulls had a great one: television.
WGN’s superstation reach carried Bulls games far beyond Illinois years before League Pass or the internet made that normal. During the championship run, national broadcasters increasingly aired the introductions live, because why would you cut away from the best two minutes of pre-produced drama in sports?
And here’s the subtle design shift. The show now served two audiences at once. Inside the building, fans got physical darkness, crushing sound, and the pressure of 18,000 people reacting together. At home, viewers got a translated version: camera placement, close-ups, crowd shots, sound mixing, commentary. Television didn’t just point a lens at the arena. It converted the arena into content.
Which produced the quietly wild endpoint of the whole thing: the crowd became part of the product. You weren’t just watching the Bulls anymore.
You were watching Chicago watch the Bulls.
How the Show Became an Industry
So what happened when the rest of the sports world saw all this on TV every June?
Some of it was direct copying. Other teams reportedly asked Bulls marketers how the presentation worked. Some organizations straight-up used “Sirius,” which is less “inspired by” and more “ctrl+C.” Nebraska football adopted it for the Tunnel Walk starting in 1994. NBA teams like Utah, San Antonio, and Phoenix rolled out comparable structures.
Some of it was convergence rather than theft. By the 90s, darkened arenas, spotlight intros, recorded music, scripted announcer cadence, and save-the-star-for-last reveals were spreading everywhere, because the template obviously worked. Not every dramatic entrance descends from Chicago, and we’re not going to claim a family tree the evidence can’t support.
When the Bulls moved to the United Center in 1994, they industrialized their own ritual. Giant video screens, the “Running of the Bulls” animations, advanced lighting, digital graphics, lasers. A show invented under the technical limitations of a creaky old stadium finally got a building that could keep up with it. (One claim we’re not making: that the United Center was “built for television.” Fun line, unsupported by the evidence. In the bin it goes.)
And look at the job listings that grew out of one electrician and a spotlight. Game-presentation directors. Producers. Audio engineers. Lighting designers. Video editors. Motion-graphics artists. Arena DJs. Hosts. Sponsorship teams. Fan-engagement staff. Then: an announcer, a cartridge, an electrician, and a spotlight. Now: an entire department programming a building second by second.
Because once the industry realized entrances could be programmed, it realized everything could. Timeouts. Halftime. Warmups. The concourse. Your phone. “Dead time” was quietly abolished.
And to be fair, the tradeoffs are real. The Bulls’ model helped create genuine collective rituals, jobs that didn’t exist before, and nights that stay memorable even when the game stinks. It also helped create modern arenas that can feel like sensory-overload machines wallpapered in ads, exhausting for sensory-sensitive fans and so tightly programmed that silence feels illegal. A timeout became entertainment. Then it became sponsorship inventory. Then it became data collection.
The Bulls proved every pause could become part of the show. The industry eventually decided every pause could also be sold.
What Chicago Actually Innovated
Time for the Illinovation Bullshit Detector, applied to our own subject.
The Bulls did not invent theatrical entrances. Or recorded music. Or arena lighting, announcer hype, star billing, crowd participation, or televised sports. Every ingredient existed before April 8, 1977.
What they can honestly claim is a systems innovation. They developed and refined an early (possibly first) NBA lights-out lineup presentation. They fused lighting, music, cadence, player order, and crowd reaction into one repeatable emotional arc. They built one of the most durable pieces of sonic branding in sports. They helped make the pregame show a real part of what your ticket buys. And they popularized a television-friendly model the rest of the industry adapted.
The underlying business lesson has escaped sports entirely. The Bulls were selling a product whose outcome could never be guaranteed, so they designed the emotional frame around it. That logic now runs conferences, concerts, restaurants, theme parks, product launches, and streaming events. When you can’t control the outcome, the surrounding experience becomes the value.
And that’s the Illinois pattern this whole series keeps finding. Illinois didn’t invent every ingredient. It assembled people, infrastructure, necessity, and stubborn tinkering into a system so effective the world forgot it was ever unusual.
So picture it one more time. The arena is dark. The synths start. The spotlight moves. “Aaaand now.” Nobody has scored. Nobody knows who wins. And the whole room is already certain something important is about to happen.
That certainty was manufactured. Not dishonestly. Deliberately. By a struggling team, a radio announcer, a special electrician, and an organization looking for literally anything it could control.
The Bulls didn’t invent modern sports entertainment.
They taught the world how to stage it.
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