1) Shaun Williamson at the 2014 World Indoor Bowls Championships final
Shaun Williamson has made a career out of pleasing other people. From his early job as a Club 18-30 rep in Tenerife to his best-known part in EastEnders as the hapless but loveable Barry to the post-ironic Barry in Ricky Gervais’s Extras, Williamson’s roles have always embraced the art of entertainment.
Still, it seemed an odd decision for the organisers of the 2014 World Indoor Bowls Championships to invite him to perform Labi Siffre’s 1987 hit Something Inside So Strong for the crowd before the men’s singles final between Scotland’s Darren Burnett and the local favourite Mervyn King. However, rather than the excruciating singalong rendition of Pharrell Williams’s Happy, which had sent the elderly crowd into an outrageously out-of-time frenzy earlier in the week, Williamson’s performance was one for the ages: serenading Great Yarmouth’s finest with a lung-busting ritual that includes a fist-clench and no shortage of face screwing.
Despite the majesty unfolding before their eyes, some of the crowd snigger. A couple of gentlemen get up to leave. The rest just sit there stunned, unsure of what to make of Siffre’s lyrics on apartheid and homosexuality being sung and reinterpreted by a former soap star. They just came for the bowls. MB
2) Kobe Bryant and Flea at the NBA great’s farewell game, 2016
It had all been planned to perfection. Kobe Bryant’s farewell would be meticulous – a near-nauseating tribute to one of the NBA’s greats after he had spent the season touring the US with a stinking Lakers team, each final visit to a city framed within the Kobe’s Long Goodbye narrative. The Black Mamba’s final game, with the Lakers long consigned to the foot of the Western Conference table thanks to 65 defeats and Utah finding out before tip-off that their slim play-off hopes had evaporated, was going to end with a preposterous shoot-on-sight policy to ensure the ageing legend would bow out on a high note on the box score at least.
What preceded the meeting with the Jazz at Staples Center, though, was perhaps even more farcical. Basketball courts have become used to odd – and often awful – renditions of the Star-Spangled Banner before tip-off but the instrumental rendition given by Flea, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist, must go down in the annals as one of the worst ever – and that’s including other previous dismal attempts.
Dressed in a Lakers hoodie and cap – despite the convention that hats should be removed for the playing of the anthem – and his neck turning to such an extent that there must have been fears it was about to fall off, Flea’s national anthem started badly and progressively got worse. Halfway through, the camera focused on Bryant, doing his best to stifle laughter as Flea simultaneously embarked on a bit of freestyling, adding his own notes at will.
A predictable level of criticism came Flea’s way but he sternly swatted it away. “I rocked that shit,” he said, with perhaps nobody else in the possession of perfect hearing in agreement. “I know that people who like music liked it. I thought it was beautiful. I really don’t have any concern for little small minds that get frustrated when they get blown. I like the big minds.” Beauty, after all, is in the eye of the beholder.
As for Bryant’s performance, it only took 50 field goals and 12 free throws to hit 60 points. AS
3) Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne at Wrigley Field, 2003
It is one of the oldest traditions in American sport: during the middle of the seventh inning, Take Me Out to the Ballgame is sung in baseball stadiums and diamonds across the US. And on a hot day in August 2003, Ozzy Osbourne – a man born in Aston, Birmingham, but living in Los Angeles and with no discernible links to Chicago – was thrust in front of the microphone at Wrigley Field , draped in Cubs clobber and proceeded to butcher the song beyond all recognition.
Ozzy was a hugely popular figure at the time; as lead protagonist of the hit MTV reality show The Osbournes, his legacy in American pop culture now extended way beyond Black Sabbath. Just as on the telly, Ozzy comically bumbled his way through his lines with his wife, Sharon, sharing the spotlight and encouraging him. If the players looked a little bemused, the crowd appeared to love it. Even the Brit’s admission halfway through – “I don’t remember what I have to do” – was met by whoops and cheers.
There was, however, a darker side to this apparently comical scene. The Los Angeles Times later reported that Ozzy had been taking 42 pills a day that summer, including eight doses of amphetamines, nine doses of tranquilisers, 16 of two different barbiturates, two anti-seizure tablets, two anticonvulsant pills, two painkillers and three sleeping pills.
“He couldn’t speak,” said Sharon. “He couldn’t walk. He was falling over. It was insane.” By October, Ozzy was walking and talking normally again. But the footage also remains – and perhaps is not so funny on second viewing. MB
4) Luciano Pavarotti at the 2006 Winter Olympics opening ceremony
Watch Luciano Pavarotti’s performance of Nessun Dorma at the opening ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, and it is easy to see how he emerged from the classical sphere into the popular mainstream. He was alreadyfamous at sports events having performed the aria on the eve of the 1990 World Cup final, also in Italy, with the final line of “All’alba vincerò! Vincerò! Vincerò! / At dawn I will win! I will win! I will win!” the perfect accompaniment to the climax of the tournament. But for the 35,000 people inside the Stadio Olympico in 2006, or for the two billion people watching at home, this was a particularly mesmeric show: Pavarotti’s instantly recognisable voice filling the airwaves, his face contorted as though he knew this would be his last performance. As it turns out, it was: shortly after the ceremony, Pavarotti was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and the following year he passed away.
It also transpired that his final performance was a fake. He mimed the whole thing, using video trickery, careful lip-syncing and a compliant orchestra that pre-recorded its backing days earlier. Pavarotti’s former manager, Terri Robson, explained that it would have been impossible to sing Nessum Dorma live late at night in the sub-zero conditions of Turin in February. While that may have been true, the real reason was due to his declining health, with the singer wheeled on and off the stage that night in a wheelchair.
“Pavarotti’s great career therefore ended with a virtual performance, something sad but inevitable,” said Leone Magiera, who was the conductor that evening. “It would have been too dangerous for him, because of his physical condition, to risk a live performance before a global audience. First I recorded a number of versions of the orchestra playing the aria, then [I] took the tapes to the small studio at Pavarotti’s house in Modena. He selected the right version before I directed him alone as he sang along, while being recorded. He found the force to repeat it until he was completely satisfied. Then he collapsed on his wheelchair and closed his eyes, exhausted.”
Some will scoff, but even in fakery, there is mastery. The fact that he even took on the challenge, despite his ill-health, planned the trick expertly and executed it perfectly - with all the zest and life that he had previously given the crowds - is remarkable. “The orchestra pretended to play for the audience,” Magiera later wrote, “I pretended to conduct and Luciano pretended to sing. The effect was wonderful.” MB
5) Sinead O’Connor at UFC 189, July 2015
Conor McGregor and the UFC president, Dana White, have not always seen eye to eye but they were in agreement last summer about making MMA events more of “a spectacle”. When it came to UFC 189 in Las Vegas and the motormouth Irishman’s interim featherweight title bout against Chad Mendes, they certainly achieved that. Indeed, perhaps the most lasting memory was not his second-round victory by TKO but his walk on, soundtracked by a live performance from his, at times, equally controversial but undeniably gifted compatriot Sinead O’Connor.
The choice of song – Foggy Dew, a ballad about the Easter Rising – was sure to stoke national pride, too, and further hype the thousands of already excited McGregor fans, many of whom travelled through eight time zones for the fight.
Whatever one’s opinion of the divisive fighter, it was dramatic stuff. The lights went down in the MGM, the octagon was coloured in green, white and gold and on one side of the arena, O’Connor appeared from the smoke in a rising platform. On the big screens, McGregor flashed up, the tricolour draped over his shoulder as he walked from his dressing room and into the arena.
“That has never happened before in the history of the sport. [The UFC has] never had people sing people to the Octagon,” said a typically measured McGregor some time after. “[Sinead]’s a powerful woman, she has a powerful voice. When you listen to her music it’s eerily beautiful. It’s go to war music.”
And go to war he did; with blood seeping out of a cut near his right eye, the Dubliner landed a clinical left to send Mendes, a late replacement for the injured José Aldo, to the canvas and he followed up with a flurry of digs. The referee intervened and McGregor was off celebrating with the belt. AS
6) Steph Curry, at every Golden State Warriors home game
Steph Curry is a superstitious man. From sending out a “Lock in!” tweet before every game, to tapping his chest and pointing to the sky after every three-pointer, to sprinting from half-court to the opponents basket before tip-off, to walking out of the locker room with his laces untied, to following Klay Thompson out when the players are introduced over the PA, to practising his three-pointers by shooting for the basket from way off the court, to sprinting down the tunnel to the home dressing room, to doing his post-game interviews in front of his locker … well, let’s just say the Golden State Warriors’s star and back-to-back NBA MVP has a series of routines that he must go through in order to get himself mentally ready.
There is one, though, which is perhaps the most peculiar of the lot: singing a jingle from a 2009 spoof commercial with two of the Warriors’ security guards before every home game. Originally uploaded by the comedian Robert L Hines with the Chicago sketch group Big Dog Eat Child, the video went viral in 2009.
“He happened to see the skit online a couple of months ago and thought it was very funny,” said Charles Dexter, one of the security guards. He started saying: ‘That’s what this hallway is sponsored by, Jones BBQ and Foot Massage.’ Now if we don’t do it before every home game, he has a problem. He gets upset.”
The most dramatic performance it is not. But if it helps Curry be the player he is, perhaps it is among the most important on this list. “If I miss a beat, I get a little nervous and have to go back and redo my steps,” Curry told ABC News. “It kinda gets me in game mode, so I kinda enjoy it.” MB
