Clay Travis: America’s most intriguing College Football Writer

Clay Travis is the author of the bestselling books Dixieland Delight and On Rocky Top. He’s currently a college football writer for Fan House. He also hosts a daily radio show in his hometown of Nashville. He wrote the ClayNation column for CBSSports.com for three years, has been an associate editor at Deadspin.com, and served as a mediocre lawyer specializing in punishing the oppressed and rewarding the guilty.

He hates jogging, the Soap Box derby, and fat girls from Florida. Not necessarily in that order.

Below, Paul M. Banks has an exclusive email conversation with Travis.

PMB: So how did you get started with CBS, and then later Deadspin and Fanhouse?

CT: While a practicing attorney, a few friends and I started a website, Deadly Hippos, where we wrote daily articles. The goal was to be funny and entertaining, write the kind of things we’d like to read. I’d write about anything, old video games, television shows, sports, you name it. The site was really popular, we started back in 2004 and that first year got a million readers.

From there I moved to CBS’s SPiN section. For the first year I was practicing law full-time and writing twice a week for them for free. The column just grew. It moved to three times a week, we added a mailbag, I went on the Dixieland Delight Tour and wrote my first book.

It was really pretty organic.

I had a sense who I was writing for the entire time, over-educated women and men who sat in front of a computer at work all day and were looking for twenty minutes of escape. That’s one reason the column spread so quickly, so many lawyers bounced the articles around.

PMB: I’m sure my readers will get a kick out of this snippet from the bio on your homepage:

“Clay Travis is the only former student manager in the history of college athletics to marry an NFL cheerleader. He managed to pull this off despite an irrational affinity for the television shows Dawson’s Creek and My Super Sweet 16.”

That’s quite an accomplishment! Kudos. Also, are there any other television shows with which you have an irrational affinity that we should know about?

CT: I don’t know about irrational, but I would be willing to cut off my pinkie to keep Friday Night Lights on the air. I also love the Road Rules/Real World Challenges, but I’m not offering up a pinkie for those.

PMB: I love me some FNL. “Clear eyes. Full Hearts. CAN’T LOSE!

So how did the book deal come about? I haven’t read “On Rocky Top” yet, but I’m a HUGE fan of “Dixieland Delight,” and “Man: the book.”

Tell us all about “On Rocky Top,” and about how much fan you had doing the DDT. I always wondered my no one had written the great American sports-themed road trip book. And then one day, a woman I used to work with who has a very large chest, recommended your book to me. Indeed someone had authored such a tome.

CT: Well, I found an agent by checking the acknowledgment sections of recent sports books. I’d already written the entire Dixieland Delight book, so that was different. HarperCollins liked it, and from there we were off.

On Rocky Top was actually the publisher’s idea. They wanted me to focus on Tennessee football in particular. I was a bit leery about writing another book about SEC football, but I came around. Primarily when my agent pointed out that they weren’t asking me to write about mold, they were asking me to write a book about my favorite team.

UT rolled out the orange carpet. I was in locker rooms, team bus rides, ran through the T. But what interested me about this book was trying something new. We’ve had “objective” insider books, think Feinstein’s A Season On the Brink, and we’ve had fan books, like Dixieland or Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer by Warren St. John, but we’d never really had a fan with access book.

So that was a challenge. And as a writer, you want to have challenges.

PMB: Very true. This entry from your Wikipedia page caught my attention. “It is Travis’s contention that men with beards are more successful than men without beards.” Can you give us some examples proving your social theory? Also, I know you’re a big Civil War buff, so how did this theory play out in an era when every man had a beard? I never knew Social Darwinism and facial hair were so inter-twined.

CT: Well, clearly Ulysses S. Grant had the best beard. If Robert E. Lee had let his beard grow past the chin he might have won at Gettysburg. We’ll never know.

That came out of my friend being annoyed by how often I would point out men with beards whenever we were out. Eventually it grew to me arguing that all men with beards were BGID–Beard Getting It Done. In other words, the raw testosterone infused beardness led to greater success.

I’ve had a beard for eight years now. I’m 31. I don’t know how many men have had beards since they were 23, but I’m guessing it’s  a small number.

PMB: In your second book, you discussed the catastrophic social trends that led to the rise of a new and awful sort of emasculated man. Who or what has blood on their hands for spawning this generation of effeminate males? (Please say the sitcom “Friends” and/or movie characters played by John Cusack)

And what can we do to prevent this from happening again? (Aside from getting all the poisonous ecoli out of our meat; that would help make us more carnivorous once again. And that’s a start)

CT: Ultimately, it’s the triumph of men who think like this, “A woman would like me more if…

If you’re a single man, once you allow a woman’s thinking to dictate your decision-making you become a pussy. Women don’t want men to be like them. The men who have the most sex don’t even think about what women want. That makes women want them.

I know this is complicated for all those guys on the East Coast reading this in a coffee shop while wearing a turtle neck.

I have no idea when it started, but I think it probably has something to do with the feminization of elementary school. As soon as little boys started playing musical chairs with the same number of chairs as there were players, it’s a small step to poetry slams.

PMB: I would agree that a lot of younger people today are from the “everyone gets a trophy generation.” In our day, if you sucked at little league, they only played you for 3 innings, and stuck you way out in right field where no one ever hit the ball. That’s the way it should be.

Spring football has received a lot of coverage during the past 10-15 years or so. Before that, I don’t recall spring scrimmages getting that much publicity. But where I live, Chicago, no one seems to care. It could be a function of my hometown team (Northwestern) not becoming a real program until 1995, and/or my alma mater (Illinois) being the BCS conference equivalent of the Kansas City Royals. I do know that just two states over in Columbus they draw huge numbers for spring football. Likewise in rural Big 12 and SEC country.

Can you see spring football going mainstream someday? And what would it take?

CT: It’s mainstream down here. And I think the reason is that people want college football to last longer than it actually does.

College football recruiting is big time down here. We had our show on signing day and it was like the NFL Draft, very comparable in terms of attention.

Football, in general, due to the shorter season, is more beloved than any other sport.

Follow Travis on Twitter here