The New Yorker published a story titled ‘Should We Keep Politics Out of Sports?’ on Sept. 17. Most of it was in response to the book Republicans Buy Sneakers, Too: How the Left is Ruining Sports with Politics by Clay Travis, a radio personality who hosts Outkick the Show on broadcasts from his home on Facebook and Periscope.
I don’t agree with Travis’ opinion but I find how the lawyer, who was living in the Virgin Islands in 2004, become somewhat of a sports pundit of sorts interesting.
While living in the Virgin Islands, Travis found he wasn’t available to watch the NFL, because DirecTV didn’t offer the Sunday ticket package. So like every rational human would do in this situation, he went on what he called a “pudding strike,” and only ate cups of the dessert hoping DirecTV would end up ending his pudding plight by offering the package on the Islands.
Naturally, he started a blog detailing his pudding eating habits. Believe it or not, it gathered a following. Not surprisingly, the package never came to the Virgin Islands.
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Travis soon moved back to his native Nashville and started writing online unpaid for CBS Sports in 2005, before giving up his law practice in 2006 and started working on his first book, Dixieland Delight, detailing his experience touring all the football stadiums in the Southeastern Conference of the NCAA.
From there, he started writing and editing for Deadspin and a national columnist for FanHouse and founded his own website, Outkickthecoverage.com, which according to Forbes is one of the most visited college football sites. He also became a host of 3HL, a sports radio talk show on Nashville’s 104.5 The Zone. He resigned from the 3HL in 2014 and joined Fox Sports, working on their weekly college football pregame show on Saturdays. His website, Outkick the Coverage, was also folded into Fox Sports and he now is a host for Fox Sports Radio’s morning show nation-wide.
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Controversy withstanding (he once said on CNN to anchor Brooke Baldwin, “I’m a First Amendment absolutist – the only two things I 100 per cent believe in are the First Amendment and Boobs,”), Travis’ rise to sports punditry is quite crazy.
Controversy withstanding (he once said on CNN to anchor Brooke Baldwin, “I’m a First Amendment absolutist – the only two things I 100 per cent believe in are the First Amendment and Boobs,”),
Travis’ rise to sports punditry is quite crazy.
He has no educational background in radio or journalism, nor has he had a substantial playing career in any sports, other than being a student basketball manager while majoring in history at the George Washington University.
All it took for him to become a pundit was eating lots of pudding for a rather absurd reason and ran with it. Now the man has written four books and owns a multi-million dollar sports brand.
It’s not entirely unprecedented that someone ends up in this type of industry but it’s still inspiring that an “everyman” and “outsider” as Travis is prone to calling himself, can make a multi-million dollar brand out of it.
