Launching Coaches into Space

Song - Space Rock

Artist(s) - Adrian Baker

Released - 1983

Primetime Usage - 1988

Contained on - Bruton BRL 12 (Industrial Video)
Featured Highlight - Chiefs @ Chargers, 1988

"Space Rock" was only used once on NFL Primetime.  That's probably a good thing.  The song itself is alright, but it doesn't really work for sports highlights.  This is especially true for the portions that sound like a knockoff of Gary Numan's hit, "Cars."  Space Rock was composed by Adrian Baker.  Baker was the singer for the '80s band Gidea Park, which is probably best known for doing the cover of "California Girls" that accompanied the snowboard-chase sequence from A View to a Kill (thanks Wikipedia!).  The track (Space Rock, I mean) is available for streaming.  Sometime in the recent past, a website called Usample that uses Universal's streaming/website engine put up most every old Bruton album from their LP heyday (I also mentioned Usample when I plugged a new source for Good Morning America! a couple years ago).  Industrial Video, which houses Space Rock, was thankfully no exception.

 

Space Rock's only highlight clip wasn't memorable.  In Week 16 of 1988, the San Diego Chargers hosted the Kansas City Chiefs in a game that figured to be the final game for both head coaches.  The people doing the figuring were correct, as KC's Frank Gansz and SD's Al Saunders—a Brit who somehow ended up serving as an American Football coach for nearly five decades—were both fired following the game.  Gansz and Saunders would be never be head coaches again, either (Gansz died in 2009, Saunders hasn't coached since 2018).  Appropriately enough, the final highlight featuring Al Saunders was narrated by none other than John Saunders (no relation… I assume).

Special thanks to GodzFire for identifying this one a few months ago by posting it privately to YouTube and getting a copyright flag.