University of North Carolina Athletics
Walston: Beats a Million Bucks
April 10, 2012 | Football
April 10, 2012
Former North Carolina linebacker Chase Rice is pursuing his country music career in Nashville. On Saturday, April 14, he will perform at the UNC Spring Game Streetfest on Stadium Drive. The following story is reprinted from the February issue of Tar Heel Monthly magazine.
By Turner Walston
Chase Rice has made a lifetime of memories in his 26 years. He's lived in three states, been a college football linebacker, a NASCAR jackman, and a Survivor runner-up. Today, he's a budding country star, and he's captured his life to this point in the song "Beats a Million Bucks" off of his 2011 EP, "Country as Me."
"That's exactly what it is, actually," Rice says of his life story in song. Chase's family moved to Asheville from Daytona Beach, Florida in 1996, when his father was contracted to build homes on the Trillium Links Golf Course in Cashiers. Rice attended and played football at A.C. Reynolds High School. Despite saying in the song that he "sure loved high school," Chase says he's not the same person today.
"I'm a completely different person," he says. "I'm different, even from who I was in college, now. A lot has changed." The experiences Rice has had in his lifetime have certainly shaped the man that he is today. "I've been through a lot, good and bad."
Entering the 2007 Carolina football season, Rice was penciled in to start at linebacker. He had started the last six games of his sophomore year, and expected to break out as a junior. "Things were looking up for me, big time," he says. But the bright outlook was short-lived. Rice tore a tendon in his ankle in the season opener against James Madison. "I got football taken away from me, and basically everything that I loved. I had to work my way back, and that gave an opportunity to a guy named Bruce Carter. He took advantage of it."
As he was working his way back into the regular rotation in the spring of 2008, Rice was dealt another blow when his father died. Daniel Rice had battled melanoma, but ultimately died of a heart attack. "That took my focus off of football," Chase says. "It's hard to go into your senior year, especially coming off an injury, when something like that has happened to you."
Two months before Daniel died, Chase was at home in Asheville, sitting on the couch with his dad and picking his guitar. "He said, `You know, it's cool that you learned to play guitar. That's pretty neat, but nobody's really going to hear you unless you start singing.'"
At the time, Chase said he didn't realize the profundity of his father's statement. "It kind of went full circle," he says. "His words kind of started my whole career, without me even knowing it." Sitting there, guitar in hand, Daniel was talking about his son's interest in music. But his words can have applications beyond Music City. "It's like a quarterback," Chase says. "If he just throws in his backyard, nobody's ever going to know. He could be Joe Montana, but not until he gets out on the field. It's a great life lesson."
Rice says the football injury and his father's passing were the two most impactful events in his life to date. He matured from the college kid who enjoyed nothing more than going out with his friends to a man who recognized that he had to be there for his family. "It definitely grabbed my attention," he says. "I feel like I became more of a serious person, and that's when I tried songwriting."
An article in Country Weekly about country artists who had lost their fathers made Chase realize that he was not alone in finding solace in songwriting. "It's a good way for people to get emotions out," he says. "The only way for me to really deal with it is to put it into a song, instead of talking to somebody about it." The first song Chase wrote was a called "Larger than Life," a tribute to the man who had inspired his songwriting career.
In "Million Bucks," Rice mentions a gold belt buckle that his father bought him when he was in high school. Having just seen the movie 8 Seconds, about the late bull rider Lane Frost, Rice told his father that he wanted to be a cowboy. "The moral of the story was that when you get knocked off the bull, get back on," Rice says. His father purchased him a buckle that reads, "Cowboy Up." For more than 10 years now, he's been proudly wearing the buckle. "I still wear it, and I plan on wearing it until the day that I die."
After Chase's career in college football ended, he had a good showing at Pro Timing Day, but didn't receive a call from any professional teams. One person who was watching was Chris Burkey, who had been a graduate assistant under John Bunting and later became a pit crew coach for Hendrick Motorsports. "He called me up and said, `Hey man, do you want to come down here and give this thing a shot?'" Rice recalls. "I didn't have anything else going on, so I moved down to Charlotte, and it turned out that it would have been a heck of a career for me, I think."
Rice enjoyed the job, working out every day and keeping the kind of camaraderie he had with his teammates in Chapel Hill. His father had raced cars as a young man, so the sport was in the family. He harbored Nashville dreams, but they weren't what ultimately ended his NASCAR career.
"I got the call to do Survivor. I didn't think that would ever happen, but it did." Rice was one of 20 castaways on Survivor: Nicaragua, which filmed in the summer of 2010.
Throughout the season on Survivor, Chase was identified as a NASCAR jackman at the bottom of the screen. That was who he was to the viewers at home. "They thought it was interesting to have me on there because they'd never had a NASCAR pit crew guy on the show before," he says. Chase and the producers agreed that he wouldn't talk much about his music on the show. "I didn't want to be that guy that goes on TV who tries to sing and promote his music, because I think that's corny."
In playing the game, Rice said he didn't try to fit into a particular reality TV archetype. He wasn't going to play the redneck just because he would be associated with NASCAR every time he was interviewed on-screen. "I just tried to kind of be myself," he says. "Honestly the producers probably didn't like it, because I wasn't doing anything really entertaining. I was just out there trying to have fun and hang out with people, and along the way, trying to win a million bucks."
But between the taping of the show that summer and the live finale in December, he wasn't a NASCAR guy anymore, anyway. Upon his return from Nicaragua, Rice found out that he wasn't in the physical shape required to be on the pit crew. He weighed 170 pounds (down from his listed playing weight of 230), and it took him a few weeks to regain his health. In that time, he visited a friend in Nashville. Brian Kelley had known Chase from growing up in Daytona Beach. After being in the town for a day, Chase called his mother and told her that he too needed to be there. "He was trying to do music full-time, and I thought he was absolutely crazy," Rice says of Kelley. "Here I am, the one that's crazy now."
But there was still the matter of Survivor. Chase was asked by producers to bring his guitar to the finale. He didn't expect to sing in front of 11 million viewers, because of the previous agreement. "But then all of a sudden, I walked out on the stage, and my guitar was sitting over there by Jeff (Probst, the host). I thought, `Is this really about to happen right now?'"
The vote was revealed that night. Chase had outwitted, outplayed and outlasted his fellow contestants, making it through all 39 days to the final three. He missed winning the million-dollar prize by a 5-4 vote.
After the votes were revealed, Probst asked Chase what he'd been up to since taping. He then began to talk about his music. "[Jeff] said, `Well, we'd like to give you an opportunity to help yourself out right now, and handed me the guitar.'" Chase then performed "Buzz Back," the first single off of "Country As Me." The band there for the live show joined in on the second verse.
Now in Nashville, Rice is trying to overcome the guy-who-was-on-TV-now-trying-to-do-music stereotype. Having paid his dues, many of Chase's fellow musicians are surprised to learn he was on Survivor at all. "My view on that is, I could not care less what you think. If I have good music, eventually it's going to be heard. Eventually, people are going to like it."
And with Nashville veterans expressing interest in recording his songs, Rice has decided that he must be doing something right. "Ninety percent of the people I see when I go to shows have no idea that I was on Survivor," he says. "Seeing that happen is a pretty cool thing."
The music stage is the fourth performance venue for Rice, after the football field, the racetrack, and the airwaves. Though he loves the experience of playing before a live audience, he said nothing yet has compared to running out of the tunnel at Kenan Stadium. "When I was doing that, I was running out with my best friends," he says. "I was with my brothers, that I would die for and we were running out together." Performing solo for a crowd is special, but sharing the experience makes it more meaningful. At a recent show in Asheville, Rice had 1,400 fans clamoring for him to take the stage. "It's amazing," he says, "but there's something about running out of that tunnel with your best friends that beats that. If music's a close second, I'll take it."
Having been in Nashville for more a year and a half now, Rice is finding that he can't just write about the country cliches (trains, trucks, momma, getting drunk), and expect to have a long career. "I have a song called, `Just a Truck,' and if you looked at the title, you'd think, `Oh God, here's another song about a truck, but then you listen to it, and it's actually got some meaningful stuff in it about what you do in this truck, and what you have done in this truck, and all the stuff you've been through. That's my biggest thing, is to just write from the heart."
By writing his own music, Rice is able to project his authentic personality on stage. "It's easy to be myself when I go on stage and out in front of people, because what they're hearing is me, and the people I'm talking to know who I am because of these songs." This year, Rice plans to release a full-length album as well as continuing to perform and seeing his songs performed by other artists.
The title of "Beats A Million Bucks" is a reference to Chase's coming up one vote short on Survivor. He won't watch the show anymore--it reminds him how close he came to winning the prize. But Chase Rice would tell you that the experiences he's had before and since his television debut are worth far more than any amount of money. The injury that took him out of football, the loss of his father, the move to Nashville...all have made Chase Rice the man that he is. It was his father's advice that spurred him to sing, and for that he's grateful.
"Nobody's really going to hear you unless you start singing," his father told him. He has, they are, and it beats a million bucks.
