Sara Evans Marries Her Football Hero

Country star Sara Evans married former University of Alabama quarterback Jay Barker Saturday evening in an outdoor ceremony at a Franklin, Tenn., farm near Evans’s home, people reports exclusively.

Evans’s son Avery, 8, walked his mother down the aisle, and the couple’s seven children (Evans has three and Barker has four from their previous marriages) were their only attendants.

The short ceremony featured Nashville songwriter Marcus Hummon, a close friend of Evans’s, singing “God Bless the Broken Road,” the Rascal Flatts hit he wrote – a song that the couple says has deep meaning for their relationship. Christian minister Joe Beam, who was responsible for introducing the couple last fall, performed the ceremony.

Evans, 37, wore an ivory silk taffeta Vera Wang gown with a halter neck and Barker, 35, wore a Dolce and Gabbana suit. The black-and-white affair (guests were requested to wear black) was accented with hints of yellow roses, and the sophisticated décor was given a down-home twist with a menu catered by Constant Craving featuring Southern fried chicken, country-style pole beans, biscuits and macaroni and cheese.

“It was really very elegant, but Sara wanted it to feel like you were at her house,” says friend and wedding planner Traci Phillips of The Perfect Party.

The bride and groom had their first dance to Chris Brown’s “With You” and the 130-some guests boogied beneath a canopy of strung lights to a collection of R&B and pop hits spun by a deejay.

Evans met Barker, the host of a morning sports radio show in Birmingham, Ala., through Beam when each had turned to the minister for support after their respective divorces last year.

“He was our own personal matchmaker,” laughs Evans, who says that Beam made both of them promise – before they even met one another – that they would let him officiate at their wedding. “I think God told Joe to get us together.”

They were engaged in March. “It was hard for me to believe he was real and that he loves me the way he loves me,” Evans tells people. “I thank God many times a day for bringing me Jay.”

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Tim Russert: The Lessons of Fatherhood

Newsman Tim Russert was plain-spoken and always determined to get to the truth – qualities, he often said, he inherited from his father, a Buffalo sanitation worker affectionately known as Big Russ.

In 2004, Russert, the longtime host of NBC’s Meet the Press, wrote the bestselling book Big Russ & Me, about the life lessons he learned from his dad, and how he passed those lessons on to his own son, Luke.

The journalist, who died from a heart attack at the age of 58, two days before Father’s Day, shared these poignant family stories in Big Russ & Me, and a follow-up book, Wisdom of Our Fathers:

All through my childhood, and well beyond it, my father held down two demanding jobs. But as hard as he labored and as long as he toiled, we never heard a single complaint about his heavy workload or the sacrifice he was making. He didn’t talk about it, he just got it done. And if he had to take a third job to support his wife and four kids, he would have done that, too … like so many members of the strong, silent generation who grew up during the Great Depression and went off to war, he had learned long ago that life was hard and nothing was handed to you. In fact, Dad considered it a sign of success, and even a blessing, that he was able to hold down two jobs. He could remember a time when a man considered himself fortunate to have even one.

Russert’s father, a war hero who rarely talked about his experiences during World War II, agreed to share one battle story with his son:

When I was in high school, the two of us were in the basement one day when Dad walked over to his desk, opened a drawer and took out a manila folder. He handed me a yellowed clipping from the October 27, 1944 edition of the Southport Weekly, an English newspaper. The headline read: US BOMBER CRASHES IN FLAMES IN AINSDALE, and the article described the crash of a B-24 Liberator at an Air Force Base in England. I read it quickly and zeroed in on the key lines: “When the plane crashed it broke up, and some of the airmen were thrown clear.” Dad, I realized, had been one of them.

“This is amazing”, I said.

He looked at me and said, “It was a lot tougher for the guys who died.” Then he took back the clipping and put it away without another word. The conversation was over.

Russert’s father never took a single sick day from his main job as a foreman for the sanitation department. Russert tried to pass that work ethic onto his own son, Luke:

On September 7, 1995, I took Luke, who was ten, to a baseball game at Camden Yards in Baltimore. [That was the night] Cal Ripken, Jr. was going to break Lou Gehrig’s Iron Man record just by showing up and playing in his 2,131st consecutive game. This wasn’t about something glitzy, like home runs … I explained to my son that Cal Ripken’s record was different from all the other records because this one was about loyalty, dedication, discipline, diligence and persistence.

I told Luke that night, and I meant it with all my heart, that Cal Ripken had done for baseball what my Dad had done for our family.

In Wisdom of Our Fathers, Russert wrote about his father’s reaction to Big Russ & Me:

I always go to [my father's home] for Thanksgiving, and in 2004, a few months after the book came out, we were loading up the car to drive to the airport when Big Russ came over to me to say goodbye. For as long as I can remember, Dad and I had always parted with a handshake and a half hug. But this time he gave me a huge bear hug and he said softly, “I love you” – something I had never heard him say before. I was fifty four years old, and all I could think was, Boy, I wish I had written this book thirty years earlier.

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Kevin & Britney’s (Separate) Vegas Weekend

Although Britney Spears and Kevin Federline were in Las Vegas on Friday, the former couple managed to navigate the social scene without running into each other.

While Spears, 26, relaxed and sipped water in a cabana at the Cinevegas party at the Palms Place, Federline drank Jack Daniels at Strip House only a few miles away. And while Spears’s night ended early, her ex kept the party going past 3 a.m. at Prive Las Vegas, where he was honored as “Father of the Year”.

Looking dapper in a black suit and red tie, Federline, 30, arrived at Prive just before 1 a.m. with an entourage of about 30, including his divorce lawyer Mark Vincent Kaplan. At a VIP table, Federline nodded his head to several hip-hop songs and paid little attention to the risqué fashion show that was happening on top of the club’s deejay booth.

At around 2:30 am, Federline headed to the back kitchen of the club, where he was presented with a “Father of the Year” trophy out of the public eye, an honor he told reporters “surprised” him.

Spears, celebrating Father’s Day weekend with her dad Jamie, ate fresh fruit and sunned herself for three hours Friday at the newly opened Palms Place pool. Later, she began her night with a low-key dinner with a friend and a member of her security staff at the Palms restaurant Nove, where she feasted on an artichoke dish.

After donning a short black cocktail dress, the singer attended the Cinevegas party with her father, Palms hotel owner George Maloof and his business associate Jon Gray. In a private cabana, Spears showed little emotion as she sipped water and chatted with her group for two hours.

Spears is reportedly staying the weekend in Las Vegas, while Federline is expected to head back to Los Angeles on Saturday to spend Father’s Day with his children, including his sons with Spears, Preston, 2, and Jayden, 1.

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Tim Russert: His Sudden Death Explained Celebrity News

TV news star Tim Russert’s abrupt collapse at the NBC News studio in Washington, D.C., Friday came as a shock – even to his doctor.

In a statement detailing autopsy results, Dr. Michael Newman said his famous patient had passed a stress test on April 29 and had even worked out on a treadmill the morning of his death.

“Russert, age 58, was known to have asymptomatic coronary artery disease (atherosclerosis), which resulted in hardening of his coronary arteries,” Newman said. “The autopsy revealed an enlarged heart and significant atherosclerosis of the left anterior descending coronary artery with (a) fresh clot which caused a heart attack resulting in a fatal ventricular arrhythmia.”

Russert’s stress test on April 29 was “normal,” Newman said. “At a high level of exercise he had no symptoms,” Newman said, adding that his blood pressure and cholesterol were “well-controlled.”

The newsman collapsed while preparing for his show Meet the Press Friday afternoon. Resuscitation attempts began immediately and after the Washington, D.C., paramedics arrived on the scene a full code was initiated, he said. He was taken to Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., where resuscitation efforts continued to no avail. Studies show that survival is only 4 to 5 percent with sudden cardiac arrest, even with immediate medical attention like Russert had, Newman noted.

His Final Morning
Dr. Cyril Wecht, a nationally renowned forensic pathologist, said Newman’s description of why Russert died makes sense. “The left anterior descending artery is well known among pathologists as the widow-maker,” he tells PEOPLE. “That tells you a lot, doesn’t it? It’s a classical situation that one encounters with great frequency in sudden unexpected death where you get a blood clot, or a thrombosis, or bleeding and if he had an enlarged heart, that adds to it.”

Clots can be caused by any number of things, he said. “Sometimes it’s associated with stress and exertion, physical and/or emotional,” he said. “Was he flying a long time? Was he tired? People shoveling snow in the wintertime can get them. People working excessively hard. Or people under great physical and/or emotional stress and that can include flying.”

Russert had flown in from Italy late Thursday night, where he’d been celebrating his son Luke’s recent graduation from Boston College with his son and his wife, Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth.

CNBC chief Washington correspondent John Harwood and Gerald Seib, his co-author on the new book, Pennsylvania Avenue: Profiles in Backroom Power, had seen Russert the morning he died. They were with Russert to tape an hour-long discussion of their new book for his CNBC cable show, The Tim Russert Program.

“We walked out of the taping around 10:15 and Gerry said, ‘You know, I don’t think Tim felt very well,’ ” Harwood tells people. “I knew he was tired because he had flown in from Rome the night before, but I didn’t think much of it.”

Wecht said only one thing does not make sense to him – Newman’s claim that Russert passed the stress test on April 29 and that he could have passed one an hour before his death. “This hardening of the arteries is something that builds up over a period of years,” said Wecht. “So he wouldn’t be able to continue the stress test. He’d get short of breath.”

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Eva Longoria-Parker RETURN ENGAGEMENT

Eva Longoria-Parker and husband Tony Parker, who were in Paris last weekend, hit the City of Light’s streets Saturday for some shopping before rooting for Tony’s brother T.J. in a French-league basketball game.

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