When Becca Watters waited up all night to give Toby Keith a ride to the airport, she had no idea how significant that sacrifice would be. Sometimes, the worst of jobs in the arena industry is the best of lessons and leverage for the future.
It was July 2008 and Becca was a 21-year-old intern at the Spokane (Wash.) Arena. She had been hired in March. She was just learning how things worked.
Her role that summer night was as a runner for Toby Keith’s production crew. She had run before.
Runners are sourced by the venue. The act’s production crew will advance what they need – usually three or four local people who know the area so they can get laundry done or get groceries or pick up people from the airport. The opportunity to run for shows was part of an intern’s job in Spokane. It is a great way to get to know what production life is like if you are going into the live entertainment business.
Runners show up in the morning and report to the production manager to be assigned different tasks. “I can’t remember where they were on the Toby Keith tour, but it must have been starting up because I picked up a lot of people at the airport. You’re given their phone number and flight information, they have your number. You park by baggage claim, connect by text or by phone,” Becca explained. The idea was to keep it as low key as possible and it might include the artist themselves if they did not require a police escort.
Her day started at 6 a.m. and had been fairly easy. It was an exciting day, a big show, and she was especially pleased to be able to share it with her family. Her parents had come up from Portland, Ore., being big Toby Keith fans. “I was jazzed about all the stories I was going to get to tell them.”
Around 8 p.m. that night, while Toby Keith was on stage, his security director came up to Becca “because I was the runner with the big van, taking people to and from the airport all day. He said I would get to be the person who drove Toby Keith to the airport after the show. I thought, ‘gosh, I can’t wait to tell my mom, she’ll be so excited.’”
She was further informed that Toby would want to leave either 15 minutes after he got off stage, up to an hour later. Since he got off stage at 11, Becca calculated her day probably would be over by midnight.
“I’m sitting there in catering, ready to go, waiting for that phone call.”
Fifteen minutes rolls around, then an hour, and all of a sudden it’s 1 a.m., 2 a.m., finally 3 in the morning and she’s still sitting there. Fortunately, her friend, whom she had recruited to be a runner for this show, as was the norm for big productions, opted to wait it out with her, so she was not alone.
“At 3 a.m., we’re still sitting in catering and our concessionaire is taking all the carts and stuff in the room away. I realize I don’t hear any activity out in the building; no one moving around. I walk out into the bowl and everyone is gone except our security guy, who is finishing paperwork.”
A check in the parking lot reveals all the trucks and buses are gone, except for two buses. She knows one is Toby Keith’s bus, because she had transported his driver earlier that day. She didn’t know what the other bus contained, so she decided to knock on that door and ask for an update on Toby’s departure plans. Toby Keith’s bus driver happened to be on that bus and said:
“Toby is still winding down from the night and he isn’t ready to go to the airport.”
“Okay. Since you have to leave out of town that way anyway, can you just drop him off at the airport when you drive by?”
“Oh no, sweetheart, that’s your job.”
Okay, if that’s the lay of the land, then she had to find out what the hell was going on, so she got all gutsy and knocked on Toby Keith’s bus. One of the folks that works with him came off the bus and said no, he’s not ready to go yet.
“We were supposed to leave three hours ago.”
“Don’t worry, you’re going to get compensated.”
“I’m not really worried about the money. I need to be at work in five hours, and I just need to know what’s going on.”
Soon enough, it’s 4 in the morning and there is still no movement from the bus. So Becca parks her 15-passenger van right next to Toby Keith’s bus and continues to wait there. It’s summertime so she and her friend are killing time texting college friends on the East Coast. “We were kind of having a good time with it,” she admits.
At 5:15 in the morning Toby Keith finally walked off the bus, opened the van doors and sang: “How do you like me now?!”
It was the first time Becca had interacted with Toby that day. “He was pretty savvy, but nothing else was said. We did stop by a 24-hour Carl’s Jr. because he was hungry. You could tell they had been having a good time that night and they needed to get some cheeseburgers into that system.”
She emphasizes this was a rare occurrence. Artists are there to sing, maybe hang out a little, but they leave. All tours are pretty good to the runners. Toby’s production folks were gems the entire day. It was just this one final thing that occurred.
She also remembers he was a nice enough guy and, to her knowledge, that was an anomaly, not the norm. Most artists and production crews are considerate and easy to work with, and she’s sure Toby Keith is, too.
The fact that she had now put in a 24-hour day and she did get Toby Keith where he needed to be when he wanted to go, despite the frustration and inconvenience to her, did not go unnoticed by arena management.
“It was tough in that moment because you’re 21 years old, and you don’t really think people treat other people this way, with no consideration for other people’s time. I’d lived a sheltered life, I guess.”
“But it was such an impactful moment for me because it was the week after that experience that my boss, Matt Gibson, started talking to me about working in this industry fulltime and maybe there’d be a place for me at the arena.”
“He said he was incredibly impressed with how composed and professional I was during that whole experience.”
She recalls that experience when she needs to remember who she is and how to remain calm and professional in moments that can test you.
“That’s how I got in the business, because I stayed up all night to take some country star to the airport.” She didn’t even have to interview for her job right out of college, because she had instant street cred.
She tells the story with pride now when speaking to university classes, to remind them you never know who is watching how you behave and present yourself. You never know when a door might open for you based on remaining professional and showing others you can handle frustrating or stressful situations.
“I did try to speed thing on. I am not a patient person.”
She recommends having fun in this business and not taking things too seriously. “In this business, there are lots of crazy stories. You have to learn to laugh because there is no other way to get through this business.”
If she had to do it again, would it be different? She says she might have been a little more firm. After that situation, there were new building rules. The runner leaves when the final production person – their boss – is done, not when the artist is done. “But we never had an experience like that again.”
“It was one night, one circumstance, something happened. He’s not like that. Have to thank him in a way, it did open a door for me.
“I look back now and tell that story with pride.” — Based on a true story as told to Linda Deckard
PHOTO: Becca Watters, center, with good friends and cohorts Matt Gibson, left, and Kevan Kirkpatrick from BancorpSouth Arena in Tupelo.