A few years ago, Mark Tremonti went to his manager with a vision of getting “Creed reintroduced to the world.” Tremonti, the lead guitarist for Creed, had success performing on the ShipRocked cruise with his post-Creed band Alter Bridge, and so he figured that the purveyors of such hits as “Higher” and “My Sacrifice” could also draw a crowd at sea.

The pandemic capsized those plans, which were delayed further by other commitments. Frontman Scott Stapp has pursued a solo career, with his fourth album scheduled to be released in March, while Alter Bridge, which Tremonti started with Creed bassist Brian Marshall and drummer Scott Phillips, just released its seventh record last year.

But Creed recently announced that it will embark on a nationwide tour beginning next summer, its first in more than a decade, in addition to headlining two cruise festivals in the spring. It turns out the band didn’t need a boat––or even a stage––to reintroduce itself to the world. By the time the reunion tour was announced, Creed was already in the midst of an unlikely revival, thanks to a pair of surging teams that embraced its music with arms wide open (sorry).

The Texas Rangers started blasting Creed in the clubhouse to lift themselves out of a midseason funk, and kept it going all the way through their improbable World Series title run. And as the Rangers were powering through the postseason in October, the Minnesota Vikings––at the behest of starting quarterback and avowed Creed superfan Kirk Cousins––turned “Higher” into a locker room hymn and promptly went on a five-game winning streak. “The Rangers have been playing Creed and they’re rolling in the playoffs,” Cousins said after the Vikings’ win over the Chicago Bears last month. “It may have made the difference. Who knows.”

If Creed helped propel the Rangers and Vikings, then the two teams have in turn provided a lift to a band that peaked nearly a quarter-century ago, when the Clinton years gave way to a second Bush presidency and Survivor was the biggest show on television.

“Here we are in this moment where the fans have spoken, we’re back, and wow,” Stapp told me. “The Rangers and the Vikings are rocking ‘Higher’ to get hyped and involving a stadium full of people in a sing along.” The timing of the reunion tour, he said, “was too perfect to have ever been planned.”

Tremonti agrees.

“You couldn’t ask for a better marketing strategy than having a World Series baseball team using your music to get them a championship,” Tremonti said. “It couldn’t have been more serendipitous.”

A veritable force in rock music around the turn of the millennium, Creed produced two chart-topping albums and won a Grammy between 1999 and 2001, leaving the band with an enduring connection to that period. Creed was everywhere in those days––on Letterman, Leno, and Saturday Night Live––as songs like “With Arms Wide Open” played relentlessly on the radio. The band was the penultimate performer at the infamous Woodstock ’99 festival, just before the Red Chili Peppers took the stage and shit hit the fan. Eventually, Creed broke up, leaving its music mostly confined to karaoke bars, supermarkets, and the memories of aging millennials and Gen Xers. But in 2023, relics of the Y2K era are ripe for excavation, whether by TikTok archaeologists or, apparently, professional athletes in need of a nostalgia-fueled spark.

“It’s kind of just a random thing that everybody started singing to one day, and it’s kind of built on itself,” Rangers star and World Series MVP Corey Seager said last month, providing a neat description of a meme’s birthing process.

For the Rangers and Vikings, what began as pregame superstition among players quickly spread throughout both organizations and their supporters. “Higher” made its way from the clubhouse and locker room to the stadiums themselves, as fans of the Rangers and Vikings celebrated wins with Creed karaoke. And as the music led to more winning, the teams’ commitment to Creed only deepened. Rangers players devised handshakes inspired by different songs, turning the fandom into something befitting a secret society. In the Vikings’ case, Creed became a religious experience. Before a home game last month against the San Francisco 49ers, Vikings safety Harrison Smith stopped a teammate from turning the volume down on “Higher” before a team prayer. “He said, ‘Guys, this is the prayer,’” Cousins recounted after the game.

Cousins suffered a season-ending Achilles tear in the Vikings’ win over the Green Bay Packers last month, but the music didn’t stop. Following the injury, the team acquired journeyman quarterback Josh Dobbs, who stepped in immediately and helped lead the Vikings to a come-from-behind win over the Atlanta Falcons in his first game. Dobbs was savvy enough to play the hits after the victory, posting a celebratory TikTok video accompanied by “Higher.”

The Vikings lost for the first time in more than a month last Sunday night, falling in a heartbreaker to the Denver Broncos. It remains to be seen whether the band will continue to provide the season’s soundtrack, but history suggests that Minnesota won’t be the last place where a team summons Creed for inspiration. The Philadelphia Eagles turned to a “Higher” power on their run to the Super Bowl earlier this year, playing the song at practices during the playoffs.

It comes as no surprise to Stapp. From the beginning, he said that Creed “always seemed to connect with athletes and sports teams.”

“Our songs had been labeled as inspirational, anthemic and good workout music with big riffs that didn’t sacrifice melody,” Stapp said.

In addition to bringing the band more exposure, Creed’s revival this autumn has raised Tremonti’s standing within his own family. He lives in Orlando with his wife Victoria, their daughter, Stella, and two sons, Pearson and Austen. When the Rangers invited the members of Creed to make a surprise appearance at a game last month, Tremonti knew he had to bring his children, who he said are diehard sports fans. The whole experience has made him, well, a rock star at home. “They finally think I’m cool because as far as music goes, they wouldn’t know who half the people that I tour with are,” said Tremonti, 49. “But with the athletes, they absolutely love it.”

Born out of the post-grunge movement in the mid-90s when Tremonti and Stapp were attending Florida State University, Creed’s legacy has long been colored by public mockery. There are fair reasons for that: Stapp’s quivery baritone, reminiscent of Eddie Vedder, begs to be impersonated; the lyrics, Christian rock–adjacent, invite parody. Creed is a band that is far too easy to hate and only loved ironically, a distinction shared by its early 2000s contemporary, Nickelback. As The New York Times once put it, Stapp and his bandmates “were rock’s favorite whipping boys through the late 1990s and early ’00s,” panned by critics “for being too earnest, too pompous, too attractive, too pop, too derivative of Pearl Jam or just too inescapable.”

Much of the hate directed at the band is over-the-top, of course. You don’t have to like Creed as much as Kirk Cousins, but you should be comfortable admitting that “Higher” is a certified banger. The band, to its credit, doesn’t get too bent out of shape about the criticism. “It’s something that we accepted,” said Tremonti, whose solo career has included a Frank Sinatra tribute released album last year to benefit the National Down Syndrome Society (his daughter was diagnosed with Down Syndrome in utero).

Since 2004, he’s performed in Alter Bridge with Marshall, Phillips, and lead vocalist Myles Kennedy. “I’ve kind of gotten to live on both sides of the fence. I’ve got to do the Creed thing where it was a very well-known band that had a ton of fans, but also a ton of people that would make fun or whatever,” Tremonti told me. “But then I got to do the other thing with Alter Bridge and my solo bands where it’s much less known. You sell less records but you have these diehard fans and the critics praise it. And so it’s kind of, What would I rather do? Sell tons of records and not get the critical praise or get the critical praise and not sell the records? They both have their perks. They both have their ups and downs.”

Stapp, for his part, has a sense of humor about how the band is perceived, saying previously that he’s proud that Creed has turned into a meme. It wasn’t always that way. When he was in his twenties, Stapp said he bristled at the criticism and “felt like the press wasn’t digging deeper into our records and really giving the band a chance.”

“I feel very gratified by this resurgence and that the band is still connecting,” Stapp said. “Having shed the ego of a younger man, it’s all manifested in gratitude. It’s most definitely not taken for granted, but cherished.”

Now 50 and living in Nashville with his wife Jaclyn and their three children, Milan, Daniel, and Anthony, Stapp is at peace with Creed’s standing in popular culture.

“With age, at least for me, comes thicker skin and an understanding that not everybody’s gonna be a fan and people are entitled to their own opinions,” Stapp said. “I also think knowing that the fans feel the opposite helps. We all get to a place in our lives where we just focus our energy where it’s impactful and appreciated.”

In many ways, Creed has had the last laugh. All the jokes and memes “just continually kept us in the conversation, which actually ended up making us new fans all these years later,” Stapp noted.

“It’s funny how it all turned out,” he said.

Nothing has meme-ified Creed more than a nationally televised appearance more than 20 years ago. In 2001, the band was tapped as the halftime performer for the Dallas Cowboys’ annual Thanksgiving game. For Stapp, a lifelong Cowboys fan, the opportunity “was a dream come true.” The ensuing performance, however, was a cornucopia of cringe. Choreographed dancers and cheerleaders blanketed the field as shirtless aerialists soared above the band. Ten weeks removed from the 9/11 attacks, CBS’s broadcast of the performance cut to shots of Ground Zero just as Stapp reached the chorus of “My Sacrifice.”

“We pretty much just got on that stage, performed the songs and the whole production happened around us,” Tremonti said, adding: “There was no one sitting down and saying, OK, when you guys hit bar eight of this verse, there’s gonna be a guy flying through the air behind you. That stuff just all happened in real time around us. We’re like, Wow, this is, this is something else. It’s like a Cirque Du Soleil thing.”

That performance has served as a bridge between the thirty and forty-somethings who downloaded Creed on Napster and Zoomers who have no personal recollection of 9/11, keeping the band in the zeitgeist deep into the 21st century.

“The fact that it’s become this iconic, annual viral moment has only continued to connect our music with a younger generation,” Stapp said.

The surge in attention over the last month has had a similar effect. Justin Jefferson, the Vikings’ star 24-year-old receiver, admitted that he hadn’t heard of the band until Cousins brought the music to the locker room. “The only Creed I knew was the boxing movie,” Jefferson said.

Tremonti said that ticket sales for the band’s reunion tour have been highest among individuals between the ages of 25 and 35. Creed, it seems, has made some new fans. The Rangers and Vikings have, too. A native of Detroit, Tremonti has always supported the Tigers and Lions. But after the last month, his allegiances have expanded. “When you feel the love from a team for your music,” Tremonti said, “you gotta love them right back.”