Los Angeles, CA (Kenny Chesney Official Website) - Having just wrapped his The Road & The
Radio Tour - playing to over a million fans for the fifth summer in a row - and getting ready to release a high energy concert recording Live Those Songs Again Sept. 19, reigning and back-to-back Academy of Country
Music Entertainer of the Year
Kenny Chesney celebrates with the ultimate good ole boy moment: a slot on Fox's 'Best Damn Sports Show Period' on Sept. 20th. Like any football-loving, basketball-playing, baseball-throwing All-American, Chesney not only played 8 stadiums this summer, but he's friends with too many sports stars to mention.
'Yeah, I like to joke that me and the band are like a baseball team,' he admits. 'We go six months on, then have six months off - though we start getting ready three months before. It's a crazy schedule, but just like the boys of summer - we gotta go when the weather's right.'
Selling out all 57,000 of Foxboro, MA's Gillette Stadium - home to the New England Patriots - four months before the first note was played and seeing New York City's famed Madison Square Garden sell-out in less than 20 minutes, the slowest running back in the history of Gibbs High School has found a way to suit up and hit the nation's most sacred places. And if he's not doing it as a uniformed team member, he did throw out the first pitch - and spend most of the game in the dug-out with Coach Terry Francona - at a recent Boston Red Sox Game, as well as being joined onstage by Eli Manning.
'I think it's true,' allows the man whose last four studio projects have all debuted at No 1 on Billboard's all-genre Top 200 Albums chart. 'People say athletes all wanna be rock stars, and musicians all wanna be jocks! The difference, though, is that it's one thing for me to let Peyton or Eli Manning have the mic and sing a verse or two of 'Back Where I Come From,' but it's quite another to even suggest putting me in during one of their games.'
Still, the guy who's suited up and taken practice with Bobby Bowden and the Florida State University Seminoles, taken batting practice with the Red Sox and is the only artist since the Jacksons' Victory Tour to play the University of Tennessee's high temple of college football Neyland Stadium is all about his sports programming.
'Where I come from, that's what it's all about: who's playing the Vols and which teams you're following,' Chesney says. 'It's a pretty simple way to be... but it's also a lot about the way we grew up. I think sometimes we're bigger fans of the ball players, almost, than they are of this music... So getting to do 'The Best Damn Sports Show' is a pretty cool deal.'
Chesney, who's nominated for Entertainer, Male Vocalist, Album and Single of the Year for The Road & The Radio and 'Summertime' at Nov. 6th's Country Music Association Awards, is also slated to appear on NBC's 'Tonight Show with Jay Leno' Sept. 21. With a new album coming, a tour just finished and the chance to talk sports with the people who know, it's a good time to be Kenny Chesney.
