Garth Brooks

4075000

Garth Brooks is a soccer dad — a soccer dad with a private jet.

"The plane was the whole thing," the country superstar said of Steve Wynn’s deal-making perk, which solved the logistics of a groundbreaking arrangement for Brooks to headline Wynn Las Vegas.

If you expect to see Brooks around town during this National Finals Rodeo weekend, when he settles into his first regular commitment since 2001, you’ll be looking in the wrong place.

The country superstar will be putting that plane through its paces instead: finishing his first show at Wynn today, then flying past his Oklahoma home to get to his daughter’s out-of-state soccer game, hoping to "get there about 30 minutes before the game starts in the morning Eastern time, watch the game and another that afternoon, then get back about 30 minutes before (the show) starts Saturday night."

Brooks’ fans know the 47-year-old put his superstardom on the sidelines after his divorce from his first wife, Sandy, in 2001. He and his second wife, fellow ’90s star Trisha Yearwood, now live in Owasso, Okla., and share custody of Brooks’ three daughters.

They also know Brooks has vowed not to tour again until the youngest of the three girls — now ages 13, 15 and 17 — graduates from high school. "We have walked the walk these first 10 years. I really didn’t want to blow it the last five years," he says.

Wynn, he adds, was the one person to pay attention when Brooks explained his domestic situation. Then he offered the plane, along with a handshake deal that either of them could walk away from at any time and, yes, a whole lot of money.

"I told him he couldn’t afford me. I was wrong," Brooks joked to reporters at an October news conference to announce he would play the Encore Theater about 15 weekends each year for five years.

The private jet was "what no one else had thought of, what I hadn’t even thought of," Brooks said in a phone conversation earlier this week. "You could say he was business-savvy enough. I’d say he gave a damn enough to think that way. That’s kind of what melted my heart."

Now that Brooks will be doing as many as 300 shows at Wynn, fans can expect a solo-acoustic career retrospective that takes him full circle. The singer’s repeated point of reference lies on a different strip.

It’s Willies Saloon in Stillwater, Okla., one of the bars nudging up to the Oklahoma State University campus, on the drag students know as "the Strip." It was there, during his senior year of college in 1984, that Brooks first found ears for his singing and songwriting.

"Instead of looking back, it’s like looking forward and starting the Willies thing again," he says of his new venture.

When Wynn invited Brooks to test out the theater with a private show in June, the singer delivered what Wynn would describe as "his journey through his career. … It’s a story, a personal story with his guitar and his music," he noted. "An incredible range of musical history and how it affects a young man."

Brooks says he will ask these first-weekend audiences, "Please, no YouTube."

"Surprise is a big part of entertainment," he explains, and he wants the set list to catch people off-guard.

"It can’t change. It’s my life is what it is, historical influences on me. My dad’s music, my brothers’ music, my sisters’ and my friends’. How I get to my own stuff.

"When they hear the song that influenced me, They’ll go, ‘Of course, I hear it now.’ "

He hopes fans will keep the secret, but he still can vary the set list if they don’t: "I know 20 things from each one of these artists."

Each night will include a question-and-answer session. "You’re going to get a chance to ask the questions that I want to ask James Taylor. The questions I want to ask George Strait.

"That’s the whole plan: a wonderful, intimate evening where you laugh your ass off, you cry, you relate and you learn."

But the show looks forward as well as back. Brooks is already in touch with promoters and his former backing band about a comeback tour in 2015.

"If people will work with me and not YouTube this stuff, where I know it’s safe and secret? Then I can have the confidence to start breaking out new stuff on these people, trying it out," he says.

"What a wonderful gift that would be for me as an artist, to get that audience and see their reaction and get their thoughts back on it as I create and mold and shape. … That’s Willies to a T, right there."

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.