Country fans get up close and personal with Taylor Swift, Randy Travis, Gretchen Wilson, Sara Evans, Joe Nichols, Bucky Covington and Jake Owen on June 5, 2008 at the CMA Celebrity Close Up series, hosted by Lorianne Crook, which will air on GAC later this year. Photo credit: David Vespie.
July 25, 2008 — Sara Evans met her new husband last fall in what started out as a long-distance relationship. She lived in Franklin, Tenn.; he lived in Birmingham, Ala.; and they got to know each other in phone chats before they were ever even in the same room.
"We just became great friends," she told Lorianne Crook while taping the GAC special CMA Celebrity Closeup at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. "He's a great father, and his parenting beliefs and philosophy — and his whole philosophy on life, you know — is exactly mine, and we just hit it off. So then he said, 'Well, I would love to come to Nashville to meet you in person,' and I said, ‘Great.’"
So where do a sports-radio personality and a successful country music star go to officially meet each other? An expensive restaurant? An exclusive resort?
"We met at this park, and we decided to throw softball for our first date," Sara told Lorianne. "He's an athlete, and I wanted to impress him. And so we spent about five hours talking that night. We threw softball, and we went and got cheeseburgers, and we just could not stop talking. And so we have been inseparable every since, and I'm madly in love with him."
Sara’s CMA Celebrity Closeup moment debuts on GAC at 9 p.m. ET on Saturday. Also featured are Joe Nichols, Jake Owen and Bucky Covington. Click here to watch a clip from the show!
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