Sports

Sports is the third album by American rock band Huey Lewis and the News, released on September 15, 1983, by Chrysalis Records. It reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 on June 30, 1984, and ultimately charted for 160 weeks. Sports was ranked No. 2 on the Billboard year-end album chart for 1984 and spawned four top-ten hits on the Billboard Hot 100, with "Heart and Soul" and "The Heart of Rock & Roll" earning Grammy Award nominations. Sports did very well internationally, where most of its singles charted in the top 40 in multiple countries. The album has been certified 7× Platinum by the RIAA. Composition {{quote box|quote=Back in the day you wanted your albums to have a theme, and Sports''' theme was really a collection of singles ... It was really a record for its time. In the 80s, the way radio was programmed, if you didn't have a hit record you weren't going to be able to make any more records. That was it, period. So our priority was to come up with hit singles. Every tune we aimed for radio 'cause we didn't know which one was going to be a hit. We just knew we needed a frickin' hit, period. And fortunately we got 'em.|source=—Huey Lewis; Billboard magazine, 2013|width=25em|align=left|style=padding:8px;}} "The Heart of Rock & Roll" was developed after the band performed at the Agora Theatre and Ballroom in Cleveland, Ohio in 1980, which they had been told was a "great rock & roll town". The following day, Lewis told his bandmates that he felt the heart of rock and roll really was in Cleveland and thought the sentiment would make for a good song, but the band convinced him to slightly alter the lyrics to "the heart of rock & roll is still beating". "Bad Is Bad" was penned with Lewis' original band, Clover. It was written in the late 1970s while Lewis was working with Thin Lizzy, whose frontman Phil Lynott liked the song so much that he would sing a fast paced version at some of his concerts. Another version of "Bad Is Bad" appeared on Dave Edmunds' album Repeat When Necessary (1979), featuring Lewis on harmonica.