It’s been 16 years since The NBA on NBC ended its run before the league signed a contract with ABC, ESPN and Turner.

But the theme song — Roundball Rock — is as ubiquitous as it was in the 1990s and early 2000s. All over the Internet, there are tributes, parodies, remakes and one memorable Saturday Night Live sketch from 2013.

And its composer, John Tesh, loves every minute of it.

Weeks after the latest parody — taking Kawhi Leonard’s weird laugh and auto-tuning it to Roundball Rock to kick off the NBA season — dropped, For The Win spoke to the music star, radio show host and former Entertainment Tonight anchor about the song’s place in sports and pop culture.

It turns out that not only has Tesh embraced the way Roundball Rock continues to be relevant, he’s incorporated that into his concerts when he plays the tune live.

Here’s our Q&A with him (which has been condensed and edited):

Roundball Rock is still everywhere: people edit updated NBA on NBC intros with it, social media plays with it. How do you feel about that?

It’s become a bigger part of my life. I’ve got a show we’re doing now — “Songs and Stories from the Grand Piano” — and I’m in the middle of writing a memoir for HarperCollins. About a year ago, I got a clean bill of health after a three-year cancer battle. It was a struggle for me and the family and we got through it.

The reason I bring that up is: I’m going back and looking at the sports music and sports broadcasting and stuff like that. Those sports years trained me to write music quickly and use pictures to create music, and as I look back on that, the way that theme was written, it just happened so quickly.

We go out and do concerts now, 30 shows a year, that’s the last song we play. We don’t just play the song, I tell the story about the answering machine and I have it on my piano, and we found like a thousand videos on YouTube of people playing the theme. There’s guys on ukuleles, people who teach you how to play it, playing their electric guitar in their basement … so we put that on screen and show the Saturday Night Live parody of it. It’s fun for me to watch it take on its own life.

ABC, when they got (the NBA), we went to them and said, “If you want to use the theme, I own the publishing.”

They said, “We’re looking for a different sound.”

I didn’t want to beg or anything, I said, “I know Elton John and Billy Joel and Eric Clapton, I can get them all to play on the song, they love it.”

“No thanks.” Okay!

There’s something about that time when Marv Albert was announcing and Magic (Johnson) and Michael (Jordan) and all those are guys were playing, that song meant something to fans and I had no idea. It’s very dear to me. When I play a concert, when you land on that theme, you get people running up: “I had no idea! That was my childhood.” That’s really fun. It’s good to have one song people recognize.

You’d think some composers might feel weird about having one song like that. It seems like you take it well.

Yes, as a musician and as an author, you want to create something that people come back to and tell you how they use it or feel about it. You don’t have control over what that is. I have songs people say, “I got married to that song” or “I buried a friend to that song” or “I vacuum to that song.” If you create something they react to and it’s personal to them, it’s huge.

You know what else I think? Maybe I have a unique perspective on this kind of stuff because of working in sports and playing on stage and having people in front of you and then getting the view of celebrity and the cycle everyone goes through working on Entertainment Tonight. You have a real understanding and respect for when something like this happens, you really need to sit back and enjoy it.

How did you come up with Roundball Rock?

I was in Europe working on the Tour de France. I heard through the grapevine NBC was looking for a theme. They were taking submissions. I got an idea in the middle of the night and I called my answering machine. I left two messages – one with the verse and one with the chorus. When we do the show, I have to put a picture of an answering machine on behind me for millennials in the audience who don’t know what I’m talking about. I have the tape of the message and I play it on stage.

I put it on top of the piano and figured it out. I got my band together and hired some friends – five violins, couple of cellos and basses and sent a finished recording to NBC. That’s something I’ve learned from experience: Don’t make them imagine what it is, give them a finished piece. The last part of it was on VHS or Betamax, I taped a couple of weekends of NBA basketball and figured out a fast break is about 128 to 130 beats per minute. So I set the song right at that and made sure the kick drum in the mix was loud enough that you got that thumpy feeling. I sent it to them, they made a decision in two days. My joke in the concerts is: They said, hey this works and then put two of my kids through college.

The theme has been used in Olympics, and after the Falcons did a basketball-themed touchdown celebration last year. How does that work? Do you get paid royalties?

NBC doesn’t own the rights, the deal happened so quickly, so I own the publishing. I have friends still at NBC, I know all those guys. I haven’t talked to them in awhile. I thought that was an amazingly fast decision to pull up that theme and do that for the football deal. It’s like $30 or something like that, you just pay the royalties as long as it’s not the theme song.

But really, the NBA on NBC music in that situation was excellent TV work. pic.twitter.com/VEHej5oMvT — Andrew Joseph (@AndyJ0seph) September 18, 2017

What really blew me away was Saturday Night Live when they have John Tesh and Dave Tesh – I don’t have a brother. When we play it on stage and they sing “Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-basketball” and then “Give me the ball cause I’m gonna dunk it,” that moment, we join it and play it live.

The funniest thing for us, the band, is Vince Vaughn has no idea who I am. They’re showing him the card with my name on it – you can see him reading it, we’ve seen it a thousand times – he says, “You guys know Tess!” We think that’s hilarious.

Do you see things go viral like the remix with Kawhi Leonard’s laugh?

My son Gib is 37 and is so plugged into sports world. We landed in North Carolina last week, imagine my luggage going around in a Charlotte airport, and then Gib sends me a text: “Hey, check this out.” I was in hysterics. It was really funny and funniest when it got up to (Tesh sings the last part of the song).

HAPPY NBA DAY pic.twitter.com/eL95qUD1eP — Terrace House fan account (@tole_cover) October 16, 2018

Is there a future for this song somehow? Do you foresee any plans to bring it back or are you content to see it live on the way that it has?

I’m happy it’s become a part of culture. I’m not waiting around for someone to put it on television. None of it would happen without YouTube. Who knows? This sounds incredibly self-serving: If I was a marketing guy, I’d say, lets bring this theme back and bring John out center court with an 80-piece orchestra and have them play it and re-launch it. No, I have two big songs and one big event, Live at Red Rocks which launched my music career. The other was a wedding song I did with James Ingram, Give Me Forever. And this song. The cool thing about Roundball is it’s a lot of white keys. (Tesh actually plays it on a keyboard), so it’s really easy to play.

I had no idea you had a piano nearby!

I’m never more than five feet from a keyboard in my house.