My Playbook For Life
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How high school football changed everything for country star Kenny Chesney.
by Kevin Sessums
Parade Magazine
Kenny Chesney is not wearing a hat. That’s the old Kenny Chesney—or at least the public Kenny Chesney—the country mega-star who is forever party-ready, beck-and-call rowdy, always peering out at his fans from under a brim.
But last fall, something inside Chesney changed.
“You’d think I’d have been happiest in my life playing music in front of 50,000 people at Gillette Stadium. But let me tell you, it’s an odd feeling to feel alone in the spotlight,” the singer-songwriter says, sitting in an overstuffed chair in his Nashville production office. He’s wearing jeans and sneakers and a T-shirt that exposes his buff biceps. A bottle of Corona is by his side. “I was standing onstage last year, and I felt like I wanted to be somewhere else. No matter how many people were out there, it all just felt like a blank sheet of paper.” So the 42-year-old entertainer, who has sold more than one million concert tickets during each of the past eight summers, decided to sit out the season—surprising his fans and Nashville, but most important, surprising himself.
It’s said that rockers want you to forget where they come from but country stars want you to remember. This country star had to remind himself of his own roots. He spent his year off reconnecting with his family and hometown in east Tennessee, which culminated in his producing a documentary about the impact of high school football, The Boys of Fall, due to air on ESPN this fall. A reverie of innocence lost and manhood found, it features coaches and players from the pro and college ranks reminiscing about their times in high school. It also highlights a few small-town high school teams, including Chesney’s own former squad.
See exclusive pics from PARADE's phoot shoot on the football field with Kenny Chesney
“I felt as if I had lost my center,” Chesney says, explaining why he took the year off. “But sitting there talking to those coaches and hearing these icons of the game—their wisdom and philosophies about football, life, marriage, and love—relates to how I am now trying to find some balance in my life. It’s done more to inspire me than anything in a long time. I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t realize this film would do that for me.”
Chesney’s love of the game began on the football field of Gibbs High, near tiny Luttrell, Tenn., where he grew up. He didn’t go out for the team until his junior year; he played wide-receiver. “It all started for me on that field,” Chesney says. “Football taught me how hard you had to work to achieve something,” he says, his eyes lighting up at the memory of “knockin’ heads and talkin’ trash, slingin’ mud and dirty grass,” as he sings in his first single—also called “The Boys of Fall”—off his new album, Hemingway’s
Whiskey, due out Sept. 28.
In high school, Chesney was too busy with baseballs and basketballs and footballs to pick up a guitar. That didn’t happen until he went to college and began to play local clubs. “When I was playing for tips in college, I felt a fire in my soul. I had the same principle of focus that I had learned playing football.
Yearbook photos of Kenny and other celebs who played high school football
“I stopped [touring] because I need to feed this,” he says, grabbing a fistful of his T-shirt right where his heart is. “I needed to reconnect with my family. I needed to reconnect with me. I needed to pick up the guitar just because. I needed to get that kind of heart back in my life.”
He takes a long, slow swig of his beer and rubs the birthmark on his right bicep. It’s an endearing, daydreamy gesture that emerges whenever he feels his innate sweetness begin to blur his party-guy image.
Chesney’s sweetness comes in large part from being raised so well by his mother, Karen, a hairstylist, who was only 19 when she gave birth to him and was divorced soon after he was born. His father, Dave, is a former schoolteacher. Karen was a working single mom for most of his childhood before marrying his stepfather. She divorced again when her son was in high school and recently married for a third time.
“She was dating someone once and broke up,” Chesney says. “And this stayed with me. She said, ‘Kenny, I just want you to know I’d rather be miserable alone than miserable with somebody else.’ That makes a lot of sense to me.”
Chesney’s own love life has been spotty as well—most notably, his four-month-long marriage to actress Renée Zellweger, which was annulled in a miasma of media scandal in 2005. He is currently in an on-again-off-again relationship with a young Nashville nurse, Amy Colley.
Even though the breakup with Zellweger was hard, “there ain’t nothing you can do about it,” he says. “Just hang on for the ride. Now I look back on it as just another way of getting knocked down on the football field.”
And he insists it hasn’t made him marriage-shy. “Not at all,” he says. “I hope that’s in the cards for me one day.”
But does The Boys of Fall, which is filled with scenes of young men bonding with one another as well as their fathers and coaches, make him want to have kids of his own—so he can be a cheering parent in the stands? “Not really,” Chesney says. “I hope I have kids one day. But I don’t wake up every day and miss that in my life.”
What he does miss is trust.
“The world is a different place now,” he says. “I mean, if I go out with a girl, there is a possibility that she’s going to get up from the dinner table and go to the bathroom and use Twitter to tell everybody what she’s doing. And the next thing you know, everybody’s got a play-by-play of what you’re having for dinner. That would make anybody uncomfortable.”
As Chesney polishes off his beer, I ask him why so many of his songs are about drinking. Would he call himself a functioning alcoholic? Laughing nervously, he turns to one of his entourage. “Bring me another beer!” he shouts good-naturedly. Then he looks at me soberly. “I probably don’t drink as much as perceived,” he says. “I’m too healthy. But a lot of my songs were written with the idea of having a good time. When I’m on tour, you’d be surprised by how disciplined I am. Because I have to be. But when I’m off tour, that’s when those drinkin’ songs get written. That’s probably a misconception about me. Yeah, I have a few cold beers every now and then. No doubt about it.”
See photos of Kenny working the stage and the crowd
The other misconception about Chesney is that he’s not comfortable without his hat. The truth is he also learned to be follically challenged on that same football field.
“When I was 17 or 18, I’d take my helmet off on the field, and I’d see hair in it and go, ‘Good God! What’s going on?’” he says with a chuckle. “It did bother me in college a little bit—going bald—but it doesn’t at all now. What’s ironic about it is that friends of mine in their 30s and 40s are just starting to lose their hair and are freaking out. I went through all that in high school.”
For Chesney, everything comes back to football. “When my father and I didn’t have anything in common and didn’t talk about anything, there was always University of Tennessee football,” he says. “There are a lot of fathers and sons out there like that. Last year, after my tour was over, me and my dad went to lots of games. It was because of football that our relationship got better. We even went to the Super Bowl.”
Does Chesney dream of playing the Super Bowl halftime show? “If I was asked to do it—yeah, I probably would.” What he wants to do right now, however, is get the word out about The Boys of Fall. It’s as if he’s on a mission.
“I feel a responsibility to myself—the self that was that kid,” he says. “I want a sophomore in high school to take away wanting to be the best player, the best friend, the best person he can be. Football emulates life. You get knocked down—but it’s how you get up and handle it that’s important.”
During filming, former NFL coach Bill Parcells told Chesney, “I want these players and myself to hang onto your passion. If you can hang onto someone’s passion, it becomes habit-forming.”
“That was the best compliment I could have gotten,” Chesney says. “Because that’s another reason I took the year off. Not that I’m not passionate about what I do musically, but it was beginning to seem mechanical. I didn’t like that. Music has to be about the heart and soul.”
That’s a lesson he learned not onstage but on the football fields of east Tennessee.
“When I was that boy in that high school football uniform, and I was dreaming, I had no idea my life could be like this,” Chesney says. “I used to go out in my backyard and just look up at the sky and know there was something out there for me. I just didn’t know what it was. I do love my life now. I am blessed beyond belief.”
