Tim McGraw to Narrate ESPN Films ‘Shaq & Dale’ Documentary

Tim McGraw is a singer and an actor, but now he's about to take on a new role. The Louisiana native will narrate a new ESPN documentary, Shaq & Dale, about NBA star Shaquille O'Neal and his Louisiana State University basketball coach, Dale Brown.

"I hope you didn't come all this way expecting to hear a story just about basketball, about a team that couldn't quite win the way everyone expected them to," McGraw says in the doc's trailer, which you can watch above. "I hope you didn't settle in just to remember what it looked like when the player, bigger and better than all the others, ruled college basketball. And I hope you don’t think that just because one is white, and the other’s black, one’s a little younger, and one is a little older, one was a coach, and the other was a player, that two men couldn't become the very best of friends."

The hour-long film will cover O'Neal and Brown's entire relationship, from when the basketball star, then a 13-year-old on an Army base in Germany, first met Brown, through O'Neal's award-winning career and the pair's recent joint induction into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.

“From 1984 to now,” O’Neal tells Louisiana's Advocate, “there’s never been a time that Coach Brown hasn't stuck up for me.”

McGraw is no stranger to sports-themed productions. In addition to starring in both Friday Night Lights and The Blind Side, he also collaborated on a song, "Nine Lives," with Def Leppard band members Phil Collen, Joe Elliot and Rick Savage, which played before pro basketball games on ABC and ESPN in 2008.

The country music superstar isn't the only artist to dabble in sports-themed documentaries. His good friend Kenny Chesney produced and narrated the documentary The Boys of Fall, about Condredge Holloway, and co-produced the documentary The Believer, about South Carolina Gamecocks coach Steve Spurrier.

Shaq & Dale is part of the SEC Storied series. It will premiere on April 13 at 9PM ET on the SEC Network.

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