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After Rays Game Saturday, Keep Your Badonkadonk In The Seat To Hear Adkins Sing

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By WALT BELCHER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 30, 2008

Nice Guy Trace Adkins may have lost "Celebrity Apprentice" to the arrogant Brit Piers Morgan, but it turned out to be a winning experience for the tall, deep-voiced country singer.

The Donald Trump reality competition came down to a choice between the "America's Got Talent" judge and the big guy in the cowboy hat who is best known for "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" (urban slang term for shapely female buttocks).

You can hear him sing it Saturday night in Tropicana Field at a concert following the Tampa Bay Rays-Chicago White Sox baseball game.

Adkins jokes that he is playing baseball fields to get free tickets. But he's a natural choice because the chorus from his single "Swing" has become a staple at games. The song uses baseball lingo as a metaphor for striking out in romantic relationships.

"It's OK for the kids to hear as long as they don't play all of it," he said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

The 6-foot-6 Louisiana native also says he doesn't feel too bad about coming in second on "The Apprentice."

"It was a game about raising money, and I got pounded," he says. "Piers raised a quarter of a million dollars more than I did."

Adkins says he went into the game thinking he would survive a couple of episodes and raise money and awareness for the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network (one of his five daughters suffers from food allergies).

"I stayed on a lot longer than I expected, and we've raised more than $25 million since it ended," he says. "And I have a lot of people say they had no idea who I was before the show and now they have bought all my records."

Adkins, 46, played football, baseball and guitar in high school. He went to Louisiana Tech, then worked in oil fields and on rigs for 10 years before heading to Nashville in the early 1990s to launch a singing career.

His first album, "Dreamin' Out Loud," in 1996 had several hits including "(This Ain't) No Thinkin' Thing." Since then he has had 23 hit singles, including "Ladies Love Country Boys" and the "Badonkadonk" song about a woman who flaunts her assets.

He says the title "gets yelled out at me all the time," which can be a little embarrassing when he's walking through an airport.

He says he is pleased that about 25,000 people stuck around to hear him after an Arizona Diamondbacks- Detroit Tigers game.

Adkins also has put his stamp on a summer reality TV series. He wrote and recorded the title song for "Black Gold," which follows three drilling crews in their quest for oil. It debuts July 18 on truTV (formerly Court TV).

Adkins lost a pinky finger when he was roughneck on drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. He says the job is more dangerous than anything seen on "The Deadliest Catch." Doctors reattached the finger, but "there's a lot of cords on the guitar that I can't reach so it's a good thing that I make my living singing," he says.

Adkins recently worked on a couple of independent films, "American Carol," a spoof on "A Christmas Carol," and a horror flick, "Trailer Park of Terror." ("For about 90 seconds as a favor to director Steven Goldmann because he directed my music videos," he says).

He has appeared on "The Young and the Restless," "King of the Hill," "My Name Is Earl" and talk shows from ESPN's "Cold Pizza" to "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno."

But music remains his "No. 1 priority" and he is "not about to run off to Hollywood chasing a crazy acting dream because I like the dream that I'm living now."

TUNE IN TONIGHT

National Spelling Bee,

8 p.m., ABC

Watch youngsters spell words that most viewers can't pronounce. The winning one at the first bee in 1925 was "gladiolus." ESPN reporter Erin Andrews, from Tampa, will be covering the action.

Monty Python's Flying Circus, 8 p.m., BBC America

Back-to-back episodes of this 1970s British comedy debut tonight with the troupe's first program, which includes the memorable "funniest joke in the world" skit.

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