ShareThisIt's pretty safe to assume that North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams doesn't have Metallica's "Kill 'em All" album on his iPod and that 5-foot-7 drummer Lars Ulrich and his bandmates don't throw down monster jams -- the basketball kind -- between tour dates.
So the sight of Williams, Mike Krzyzewski, Rick Pitino and Bob Knight mingling with the metal band in a commercial for the video game "Guitar Hero: Metallica" qualifies as a culture clash, to say the least.
In a takeoff of Tom Cruise's scene in the movie "Risky Business," the four coaches slide into a living room wearing pink dress shirts, white boxer shorts (they said no to briefs) and athletic socks to the opening bars of Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock & Roll." With Duke's Krzyzewski and Williams on guitar, Louisville's Pitino on drums and ESPN's Knight, naturally, as lead vocalist, the faux band launches into the song.
Metallica abruptly interrupts them, Ulrich reminding the coaches there's a new version of the popular game.
"So?" Williams says.
"So that means you're gonna have to put on some pants, Pops," Metallica's James Hetfield retorts.
"Who are you calling Pops?" Knight says, then tosses the drum kit in their direction.
The coaches filmed their parts separately. The commercial took four days to shoot -- two in Raleigh, N.C. for the coaches, one in the San Francisco area for the band and one for the living room set to be shot in Los Angeles, producer Ron Mohrhoff said Monday in a phone interview. The scenes were combined digitally.
Williams said the coaches probably would have had more fun together, "but if you'd had all four of us there at the same time, it would probably have taken 30 days to do a 20-second commercial, because it would have been so hard to get all of us to do exactly the right thing at the same time."
Metallica loved the idea, Mohrhoff said. The coaches were a little reluctant at first. "They didn't want to be portrayed as over the hill" or made to look foolish "standing there in their underwear," Mohrhoff said.
In the end, the four "had a blast" shooting the ad, he said.
The coach likeliest to have joined Metallica under different circumstances? Knight. His unhesitant honesty and spirit of abandon -- "recklessness if you will," Mohrhoff said -- are well suited to rock and roll.
"A lot of rock musicians chose that line of work because it was against the grain," Mohrhoff said. " ... He was just willing to put it out there."
(Contact Roger van der Horst at roger.vanderhorst@newsobserver.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit The News and Observer of Raleigh, N.C.
