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OFFSTAGE: Choir Nerd Chris Young Ready for Opening Day

(CMT Offstage keeps a 24/7 watch on everything that's happening with country music artists behind the scenes and out of the spotlight.)

Those are his words, not mine. Chris Young told me that that's exactly what he was in high school: a choir nerd. With the ACM Awards behind him, he is now getting ready to sing the national anthem at the Chicago White Sox opening day game on Thursday (April 7). So we talked last week about his love of the game. "I like watching sports all the time. Especially baseball. If you go to a game, you gotta go, get a hot dog, sit down watch the game. It's just the all-American pastime," he told me. But was he ever an actual player? "I did play. But I was terrible. Really bad. I didn't play in high school because, first of all, I was shorter and way skinner back then. Like a rail. And because you had to pick between sports and choir. You couldn't do both. So I picked choir," he said. "I was the choir nerd." So maybe he missed out on team sports, but with the way his career's taking off now, I think he chose well. He's done the anthem plenty of times before, but never at an MLB opening day. Which makes him a little nervous. "Singers worry about that song because you can do a million things to screw it up. You can't start too high, and you can't start too low. And, you have no control over the sound," he said. But come opening day, I personally think he'll knock it out of the park.

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