Why would anyone do this, especially a hip-hop label?"Īfter selling 100,000 copies of the first Jock Jams, Tommy Boy Records released a second volume one year later. "I thought it was the worst idea," Tommy Boy director of sales Steve Knutson remembered. Tommy Boy managed to convince ESPN enough to move forward with the project, but even a few people at the record label believed it to be a strange idea. Although the channel had an interest in branching out into other forms of media, such as video games, a magazine, and the internet, it hesitated to put its name on a music album.
"It sounded like a cool idea but we were a little skeptical," ESPN's Sharyn Taymor recalled. Unfortunately, ESPN initially expressed doubt over the proposal.
"Our idea was to brand it around baseball, football, basketball and hockey and make it a dance record," Silverman said, "but when you put it in the of a game and tie it in with ESPN it made sense." In order to make the Jock Jams idea work, Tommy Boy partnered with ESPN to give the album more credibility and marketing power. Jock Jams was not the first compilation album Tommy Boy put together, having previously collaborated with MTV to make MTV Party to Go as a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. To complete the arena experience, producers added organ music, crowd noises, and even Michael Buffer's memorable "Let's get ready to rumble!" call between songs. "We have all these songs we play at the games from a wide variety of genres but they all seem to work together in the context of making people crazy at sporting events. "It's an idea that had been going around in my head," he recalled. Like Silverman, Castoldi thought the album idea was brilliant. Lynch presented her idea to Tom Silverman, and he got on board after realizing that "songs you heard at basketball games were becoming legendary with a different audience." Lynch also contacted Ray Castoldi, the music director of Madison Square Garden, and asked if he'd like to contribute organ music to the album. "I would hear the same music being played at the games, all these classic rock and R&B tracks with these organ bits in between, so I thought this stuff would probably be pretty easy to license." "To tell you the truth it was just like one of those very simple, very obvious ideas," Lynch remembered. She noticed how the music played at the event pumped up the players and crowd, and she wondered if she could capture that feeling on an album. In the early 1990s, Monica Lynch attended many Knicks games to make use of the company's shared box suite at Madison Square Garden.
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