Ben Strauss is the co-author of Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA, winner of the 2017 PEN/ESPN award for literary sports writing.

“Is ‘tank’ too strong a word?” Clay Travis asked gleefully, tapping out a tweet to his nearly 500,000 followers. It wasn’t, he decided, and he hit send: “NFL ratings tank as Trump feuds with NFL protesters, ESPN subscribers plummet.” He sat back and felt a wave of validation as the likes and retweets spiraled higher and higher.

Travis, 38, is among the most listened-to sports personalities in America. He made his name tying the business woes of ESPN to its coverage of politically progressive athletes. But since Donald Trump’s election he has evolved into something much bigger than just a sports bro with an unlimited supply of attitude. In warp speed, he has gone from opining and blogging on SEC football and posting leering pictures of quarterbacks’ girlfriends to a darling in Republican media circles, a reliable source of ammunition in an increasingly bitter and polarizing national culture war. He is an oft-cited source on websites like the Daily Caller, Breitbart and Lifezette, delivering anti-politically correct hot takes like offering $50,000 to charity if progressive commentator Shaun King would take a DNA test to prove he is black.


It was Travis who, after violence this summer in Charlottesville, broke the story that ESPN had pulled an Asian announcer named Robert Lee off a scheduled telecast at the University of Virginia. ESPN said it was a simple maneuver to protect an employee from online abuse, but Travis claimed it was the epitome of PC-culture run amok. The scoop landed him not one but three appearances on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox. When ESPN host Jemele Hill called Trump a “white supremacist,” Travis was summoned to CNN as the designated conservative voice; he promptly deployed a favorite line about the two things he believes in: “the First Amendment and boobs.” Viewers were aghast, but a vast swath of conservatives roared with approval. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, he notes proudly, follows him on Twitter.

Then, on Friday night on a stage in Alabama, Trump picked a very public fight with professional football players, calling for them to be fired for kneeling in an ongoing protest over racial injustice, inequality and police brutality. When Travis woke up the next morning, he turned to his wife and said, “This is bad for America, but this is great for us.”

On Monday, two days after his early morning prediction, Travis was sitting in the third-floor TV studio of his six-bedroom mansion outside Nashville, preparing for his first show since Trump had called any NFL player who kneeled a “son of bitch.” He wore a shirt emblazoned with his favorite acronym: DBAP, short for Don’t Be a Pussy (They are for sale on his website.). His wife, Lara, a former Tennessee Titans cheerleader, wore a pair of pink yoga pants and was curled up in a red leather recliner across the room. “Usually, I can’t watch because I’m afraid what he might say,” she told me.

Over the course of the weekend, the New York Times, Washington Post and Sports Illustrated among countless others had applauded players for standing up to a bully of a president, who they said was preying on a divided country. Travis remained unmoved. While others were busy counting the number of kneeling players, he was parsing the ratings figures. And that was all he needed to ridicule what he called a self-defeating protest: CBS was down 1 percent, Fox down 16 percent and NBC 11 percent for its NFL games on Sunday and that was proof, according to Travis, that the protesting players were driving fans away.

“What are the players protesting?” he asked over and over again during his nearly 33-minute Periscope show, which was simulcast on Facebook and would be viewed more than 70,000 times. The civil rights movement, he said, had an aim: “The goal was voting rights!” But these players were alienating the fans that paid their salaries. “I don’t know that players are making rational decisions when they think about where their income comes from,” he continued. “When the television ratings tank … players make less money.” His audience ratified his view: “White people don’t watch football anymore,” read a comment on the Periscope feed.

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This kind of explicitly race-tinged view is not uncommon among Travis’ followers (a caller on his radio show that morning had called Barack Obama a Muslim, though Travis had corrected him and ended the call) and it speaks to a consequence that the two-time Obama voter never imagined when he launched his website, Outkick the Coverage, in 2011. Travis is adept at spinning the numbers to fit his narrative—NFL ratings are, in fact, down lately, but the cause is nearly impossible to discern (pregame shows were way up on Sunday); ESPN, meanwhile, did lose an estimated 200,000 subscribers this month, but over the past year the network has lost households at a lower rate than Fox News. Math aside, Travis has fashioned a powerfully appealing identity from the playbooks of an array of media stars on the right. He has the in-your-face masculinity of Mike Cernovich; Rush Limbaugh’s national radio show; and the independent media company model of InfoWars’ Alex Jones. Travis even has a catchphrase like Fox News: “I’m a radical moderate,” he likes to say.

On Wednesday, in the wake of news that Tennessee Senator Bob Corker might not seek reelection in 2018, Travis mused that he might run to fill the seat. “He’s the perfect voice for the moment,” said a sports media executive. But as he has ridden the Trump wave to fame since the election, many who know him well have watched with something bordering on discomfort, even dismay.

A few minutes before Travis began taping his Periscope show, I sat with Lara, a former guidance counselor turned stay-at-home mom, on the patio outside their house overlooking the driveway where Travis’ Mercedes and her luxury SUV were parked. She was a Hillary Clinton voter in November (Travis says he voted libertarian) and I asked how it felt for her husband to be embraced by a part of the electorate that represented exactly what she voted against.

She thought about the question for a few seconds, clearly wrestling with an idea that had been on her mind. “He might be looked at as the person who supported Trump when he went after black athletes,” she said. “I hope he’s not remembered for that in history.”



***

Travis first gained notoriety on the Internet in 2004 when he was working as a lawyer in the U.S. Virgin Islands (he did everything from criminal defense to corporate law). A die-hard Tennessee Titans fan, he couldn’t get their games on TV so he protested by eating nothing but Snack Pack puddings, and blogging about it, hoping DirecTV would change its distribution policies. It didn’t work, but he received a good bit of media attention, and the response led him to start blogging part time. After he moved back to Nashville, he signed a book deal to chronicle his experiences at every SEC stadium, and quit law for good. (The book, I was told by a number of sportswriters, is a rollicking travelogue.)

After blogging for CBS, Travis was hired by Deadspin, now a progressive voice in sports media that skewers Travis regularly, but he was bought out after only a few months after clashing with another editor. By 2009, Travis had published another book—this one about University of Tennessee football—and was writing for AOL’s sports site, FanHouse. The site was shuttered suddenly and let go of its entire stable of writers in 2011. Travis was 32 with two young kids and only a meager salary from a local sports talk radio show in Nashville. “I had this moment where I really didn’t know what to do,” he said. In July of that year, he filed his first post on Outkick the Coverage, something from the SEC’s media days.



He might be looked at as the person who supported Trump when he went after black athletes,” says Lara Travis. “I hope he’s not remembered for that.”



From the beginning, the irreverence behind NFLpuddingstrike.com was the ethos of Outkick. Travis wrote mostly about SEC football, but he answered anonymous mailbag questions and embraced the sophomoric, too. He was also keenly aware of what his audience wanted. In 2013, he broke a feel-good story that a young cancer patient at St. Jude would announce a pick at the NFL draft—it received a few hundred clicks. A few months later, he posted pictures of an SEC quarterback’s new girlfriend. “The site almost shut down,” he said. “People say they want the cancer survivor, the good stories, but what they want—at least my audience—is pictures of hot girls.” If anyone wonders why he made his boobs comment on CNN, this is why: It’s part of his business model and it works.

Travis also devoted himself to analysis of the sports media industry—and that meant ESPN, which he would he eventually dub MSESPN for its resemblance to NBC’s famously liberal cable news network. He wasn’t assailing the network’s politics at first, though; it was the way it was run. As Will Leitch, Deadspin’s founder, told me, “Deadspin’s easiest target was ESPN—it was the establishment—and we went after them for being too corporate. And it’s still the biggest, that’s why you go after them.” Even as Travis began to predict ESPN’s demise—he believed that leagues would soon broadcast their content straight to fans—he worked closely with the network, including a glowing 2011 profile of one of its most prominent college football announcers, Kirk Herbstreit. “Big, strong personalities are a big part of what has made ESPN’s College Gameday so successful,” Travis wrote.

As Travis was building his site, the sports industry was changing, too. Bryan Curtis noted earlier this year in an insightful piece for The Ringer that sportswriters have in recent years moved left on the political spectrum. “In the age of liberal sportswriting, the writers are now far more liberal than the readers,” he wrote. “There was a space that opened up for Clay,” Travis’ producer, Jason Martin, told me, adding that for a Tennessee conservative like him, none of ESPN’s most visible personalities—by which he meant people like Jemele Hill and Mina Kimes (both women of color)—seemed to speak to his political values. An ESPN staffer with whom I shared that critique told me, “Like ESPN doesn’t have a ton of white people on TV?”

But the gripe that sports media does not welcome conservative views goes well beyond just Travis and Martin, and it’s one shared by people inside the industry. One conservative sportswriter told me that he was afraid to voice his political opinion for fear of getting ripped on Twitter or by a site like Deadspin. And, it should be pointed out, it was someone inside ESPN who leaked to Travis the Robert Lee story, fully aware of the consequences of doing so.

In many ways, though, Travis is an unlikely figure to become the voice of the disaffected conservative fan who doesn’t want his peas and mashed potatoes to touch. Travis is a lifelong Democrat, having volunteered for Al Gore’s presidential campaign. In college, at George Washington, he worked in the office of Democratic Congressman Bob Clement of Tennessee. In addition to his law degree from Vanderbilt, Travis also has a Masters of Fine Arts (his thesis was a murder mystery based in the Virgin Islands). His bookshelf, he pointed out to me, contains Taylor Branch’s seminal series on the civil rights movement and a stack of William Faulkner novels. And, yes, there’s a copy of Jim Miller and Tom Shales’ exhaustive oral history on ESPN—Those Guys Have All the Fun.



Travis is an unlikely figure to become the voice of the disaffected conservative fan: He’s a lifelong Democrat who volunteered for Al Gore.



But there were some aspects of Travis’ background that made him absolutely perfect for the role. His biggest audience was SEC football fans, living in states where the distinctions between college football and Republican politics are sometimes hard to discern. (It also didn’t hurt that in 2013 he had been hired by ESPN competitor Fox Sports as a TV personality, and the site hosted his blog). There was plenty of overlap between his audience and the one that lapped up accusations of liberal bias in political media. It helped, too, that Travis loves controversy even more than college football. “He loves the big response,” his wife, Lara, told me. Bobby Bones, another Nashville radio host, recalled the first time he listened to Travis on local sports radio Travis delivered a screed against food stamps. “I had been a food stamps kid, so I hated him,” Bones said. “But, honestly, the more I listened to him, the more I respected that he was willing to make his arguments.”

And so when ESPN lavished attention on the openly gay college football player Michael Sam in 2015—the network showed him kissing his boyfriend when he was drafted—and then gave its Arthur Ashe Courage Award to transgender icon Caitlyn Jenner the next year, Travis pounced, introducing his MSESPN epithet. He also had a field day when ESPN fired Curt Schilling, after the former baseball star posted an image of an overweight man wearing a wig and women’s clothing with his breasts exposed. The caption: “LET HIM IN! to the restroom with your daughter or else you’re a narrow-minded, judgmental, unloving racist bigot who needs to die.” (Schilling had also received an array of warnings.) ESPN was now MSESPN and Travis’ audience ate it up, which in turn attracted more conservatives to his orbit.

Then came election season. Travis went on Periscope to break down the debates during the primaries and then the general election, wading further into politics and flexing his muscles as a political pundit. With his audience growing, Fox Sports radio approached him about a national radio show in 2016. As Travis and Martin discussed its mission, Martin told Travis that he was never going to be Skip Bayless—a Fox Sports personality who used to work at ESPN—and could spew sports statistics like a human computer. “He had to have the audience that was going to listen to him because they loved him and the audience that listened to him because they hated him,” Martin told me. “And he had to be able to go beyond sports.” Travis’ show debuted in the fall of 2016 around the same time Colin Kaepernick’s protest became one of the biggest stories in the country (then-candidate Trump helped stoke the backlash with comments disparaging Kaepernick). Whenever Travis talked about the quarterback, the phone lines lit up. “It was clear we were on to something,” Martin told me.

The posts on Outkick followed suit. In December 2016, Travis wrote a post titled, “It’s racist to talk about benching Dak Prescott,” the black quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys. A few months later, he posited that UFC fighter Ronda Rousey was a creation of the liberal media; that take was picked up by Breitbart.

The speed of Travis’ evolution amazes those with whom he was on good terms only a short time ago. And some of the people who feel most bruised, not surprisingly, are employees of the network he’s treated like a punching bag. ESPN has always quibbled with the numbers in his “ESPN is doomed” pieces (others did, too), but the relationship was far from toxic. In 2013, an ESPN exec says Travis lobbied to be hired for the soon-to-be-launched SEC Network. Travis says he did talk to ESPN, but that the network couldn’t match his FOX salary. As recently as 2014, Travis, in the wake of rape accusations against Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston, sent a draft of a story written by a female writer—a first-person account of sexual assault—to a friend at ESPN, asking for comments, before he published it on Outkick.

Last year, in conjunction with the election season, Travis began to needle the network more on social issues. He asked for an official comment on whether the network would take back its ESPY if Jenner transitioned back to being a man; another time he asked if the network would comment on whether he was racist. When an old ESPN friend saw him in Tampa at the college football national championship game earlier this year, and asked what was going on, Travis answered bluntly: “I’m going to be the Howard Stern of sports.”



***

Travis does his radio show every morning from a studio in downtown Nashville not far from all the studios on Music Row. He is up at 4 every morning for the 45-minute drive. Travis told me in the year he’s been in the studio, he hasn’t touched the decor, which is a hodgepodge of sports and pop culture paraphernalia. Soccer jerseys—Arsenal and the Dutch national team, among them—hang on one wall, old record albums, from Elvis to Wings, on another. Not far from where Travis sits is a poster with the face of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther who was convicted of the murder of a police officer in the 1980s and is still serving life in prison, though many supporters believe he is innocent. “Free Mumia” the poster reads.

On Monday, Travis spent a few minutes discussing college football and the NFL games, but it wasn’t long before he dove headlong into the protests, asking callers if they could explain what the players were after.

Callers offered their hypotheses and Travis swatted them down. If they were protesting police killings, Travis wanted them to know that more white Americans had been killed by police than black Americans this year. If they were protesting racism, writ large, he scoffed at that, too, asking his listeners if racists were tuning in to the protests and suddenly becoming less racist. As for protesting Trump? He called that a protest against a protest against a protest—too confusing to have any serious meaning.

Travis did not mention that earlier this month a group of NFL players sent a letter to the league with a detailed list of exactly what they wanted, including help publicizing issues like bail reform, mass incarceration and transparency inside police departments. The players asked owners, coaches and GMs to take a prison tour and to engage with politicians on the state and national level. When I later mentioned the letter to him, he asked me, “What percentage of the players protesting do you think ever read that letter?”

Over the course of the past year, even if he has been wrong, Travis has at least seemed right. ESPN has lost 13 million subscribers over the past six years, though the reason for its financial troubles can be traced not to politics but the billions of dollars it has committed to broadcasting rights at a time when people are dropping cable TV in droves. The network has also stumbled painfully through the current political climate, trying to thread the needle of the Trump era. Its own ombudsman has written that the network needs to embrace more conservative voices in the newsroom. The network has also emboldened Travis by responding to him. After Travis dropped his boobs line on CNN, a network executive tweeted that Travis said boobs 53 times on the radio one morning. “That’s exactly like Howard Stern and the FCC,” one sportswriter told me.

Travis told me the response both to him—and to Trump— was groupthink hysteria. As people worry that Trump is destroying the country, they are missing the point that the stock market is skyrocketing, evidence to him that the country has rarely, if ever, been in better shape. “These people don’t know history,” he said. “We had elections during the Civil War—that was when the future of the country was really at stake.”

“He really is the same guy I knew in law school,” said Tim Weatherholt, who, like Travis, believes that the media has moved left, rather than Travis moving right. And several Travis fans pointed me to a piece he published on Outkick this summer about the future of sportswriting—and his own experiences building his site—after mass layoffs at both Fox Sports and Sports Illustrated. It was evidence that despite the politics of the moment, he remained a shrewd writer. “Clay makes me think about things in ways I would never think to,” said a former co-worker at Fox, and a liberal Democrat. “When the guys on Pod Save America say, ‘Fuck Trump,’ no one says they’re dividing the country.”

Still, there are other Travis takes that are obvious red-meat offerings to the racially charged segment of his audience. When LeBron James told reporters earlier this year that his house in Los Angeles had been spray painted with the N-word, Travis demanded proof of the incident, suggesting, without evidence of his own, that it was a hoax. He tweeted: “Michael Jordan and his posse would have never made up a fake racist graffiti story to excuse getting his ass kicked in the finals.”

As Martin told me, Travis’ audience “expects certain things from him now.” Martin also disagreed with Travis comparing Hill’s comments that Trump was a white supremacist to those of another ESPN employee, Linda Cohn, who was recently suspended for criticizing ESPN’s politics. If Cohn was suspended, Hill should be, too, Travis said. “Linda Cohn criticized the company, which was different than what Jemele did,” Martin said.

Then there is the darker side to Travis’ rise. After the Robert Lee story was gobbled up by conservative outlets, one website badgered the network about whether it would allow Jon Gruden to announce games because his name had Nazi connotations. The outlet sent a series of aggressive requests that made one ESPN employee uncomfortable. She had known Travis for years and asked him to intervene on her behalf. Travis’ response: “That site is actually not bad.” (POLITICO is granting her anonymity because of her fear of harassment.)

Chris LaPlaca, an ESPN executive, sent Travis an angry email about the exchange, and Travis posted it online, including LaPlaca’s contact information. LaPlaca received a torrent of abuse online, some people threatening him physically. “It was like a letter to the editor so I published it,” Travis told me. He has also noted that he has received plenty of abuse, too—he moved from his old house in downtown Nashville because of it. But the difference is that Travis is now stoking those flames.

At least for now, Travis is on top of the world. His Twitter following is exploding—he added 50,000 followers after his recent performance on CNN—and he has more viewers on Periscope than ever. His radio show will be downloaded more than a million times this month. Odds Shark, the sponsor of his Periscope show, pays him a fee in the six figures to slap its logo on a screen behind him during the videos, Travis told me, part of the multimillion dollar business Outkick has become.

The day Travis did a Periscope show about his boobs line on CNN, he showed me a list of all the prominent ESPNers who had watched it: Dan LeBatard, Samantha Ponder and Tony Reali. Kevin Sumlin, the Texas A&M head football coach, also tuned in. (And when I told one sportswriter about the Zillow listing for Travis’ house, he responded, “Holy shit. Perhaps I should use the word ‘cuck’ on the radio more.”)

And yet, nearly every Travis supporter I spoke to cringed when I brought up his association to the alt-right. Travis shrugs. I asked him about a recent piece in The Daily Beast that compared him to Alex Jones; he said he didn’t know much about Jones. But Martin told me when the piece came out, Travis asked him if he was like Alex Jones. “I told him no,” Martin told me. But that distinction gets a little harder to make the longer he plays this role. After his latest spat with ESPN over Robert Lee, he ran into the ESPN employee who had asked for his help and he tried to give her a hug. “Don’t fucking touch me,” she said. “It was an overreaction to a tap on the shoulder,” Travis said.



I don’t know if he realizes that he can’t go down this road and then come back,” says Will Leitch.



“I don’t know if he realizes that he can’t go down this road and then come back,” Leitch told me, noting that as recently as 2014 Travis had emailed him wondering why Deadspin was attacking him. “He wasn’t this soulless monster then, but it’s like Darth Vader now. Vader was more machine than man; Clay’s more Pepe the Frog than man now.” Added a fan of Travis’: “Has he prioritized short-term money over long-term morality? Maybe he has.”

Travis tells Lara all the time that the opinions of his wife and family are the only ones that matter to him. He has three sons, and on the day I spent with him, I watched Travis listen to his toddler, Nash, sing him the ABC’s. His oldest son, 9-year-old Fox, isn’t into sports, but sings in the Vanderbilt children’s choir. “I’ve always been somebody who doesn’t care that much about people I don’t know, what they think of me,” Lara told me. “That perhaps for me is shifting a little bit more. I care more about people we don’t know—what they think of us.”

Walking down Main Street in downtown Franklin on Monday afternoon, Travis was stopped by a fan. He was a chunky 20-something who worked for a beer distributor. “Love your stuff, Clay!” he said, and snapped a selfie with Travis. After Travis walked away, I asked the man, who wouldn’t give me his name, what he liked about Travis. “He just says things no one else says,” he answered. But what does that mean, I asked. Was it the sports? Was it the politics? He paused, then said, “No one else is willing to call Colin Kaepernick a piece of shit, but Clay does,” he said. “And I think Colin Kaepernick is a piece of shit.”

As Travis and I got in his car, Travis asked me what he said. I told him about the Kaepernick line. He smiled, and hit the gas.