Country singer Tim McGraw had more than 10,000 fans in the palm of his hand Friday night at Verizon Arena, but then he had to bring up football. He was trying to tell a story about going to college in northeastern Louisiana, and the mere mention of our neighboring state to the south brought out the “boos.”
And then, like a child poking a fire ant nest, he made things worse by mentioning LSU, which wasn’t even his college. He seemed stunned at the thundering chorus of “booing” that created, so he tried to calm the waters by mentioning how he’d heard the Razorback quarterback, name of Mallet, was quite a player.
Not long after, he tried to tell another story, this one about his wife, Faith Hill, who is from Mississippi, and, well, you can imagine what happened.
Other than those two incidents, the fans were on their feet for much of McGraw’s two-hour set, and they also seemed quite enamored of the relatively new opening act Lady Antebellum, who are following the Sugarland road to success, with female and male harmonies.