Real Clear Sports Interview

I've linked before to the Real Clear Sports interviews. They're generally excellent, well thought out questions, and good, perceptive answers. Now I'm included in their roster of interviewees. Hopefully I'm as good as the others have been.

Here's an excerpt:

RCS: You mentioned the fan perspective, so we have to say: It's no secret that you are a lifetime supporter of Tennessee football. In writing On Rocky Top, you were often forced to walk a fine line between reporter and fan. Sometimes, like when you got to run through the "T," those roles overlapped. Where do you stand now, some eight months after going back to being a full-time fan?

Clay Travis: What really interested me about this book wasn't writing a completely inside look at a team. That's been done quite a few times. What I wanted to capture was this question: what would it be like as a fan to have an all-access path to your favorite team?

I don't think it's been done before. So I felt an obligation not just to tell what happens, but to capture what it feels like for other fans. Now that doesn't mean that I'm not reporting on the entirety of the season, but I'm not doing it as a disinterested observer, there's a lot of passion involved.

The reality is full access attacks fandom. Because it makes you realize how absurd it is to care so much about the guys wearing "your" uniform colors. But that's only if you logically analyze fandom, which is illogical to begin with. So I wrestle with that throughout the book, will being so close kill the fan inside me? But I think that's true across the board logic is the enemy of sports in general.

I wanted to do a show, still do, where I follow an intramural basketball league for a season with the same intensity that ESPN covers the NBA. I want guys in suits sitting on the sideline debating who is taking shots, who is starting, whether players really like each other. I want to interview players at half time, coaches. I want to do the whole thing. All deadpan. I think it would be outstanding. Because when you get right down to it, there's a great heaping of sports absurdity that never gets mocked. At least not enough.

I'd like to be the telecast's version of Stephen A. Smith. Only I'd be the angry white guy. I think ESPN has become so all encompassing and takes itself so seriously that a show that did this would be extraordinary.

Clay Travis, rushes up to 5'5 195 pound white guy in rec specs, "Johnny, how could you make that pass? What were you thinking?"

And you know what Johnny would do; he would answer just like athletes do. Which would prove the point, we're all playing roles now based on what we've seen on television before. But I still think it would be hysterical for those of us who have been down the rabbit hole.

Hell, I'm 30, the same age as ESPN, I've never lived in a world where ESPN didn't exist.

RCS: While we're talking about younger kids, even though your book focuses on Tennessee football, it also occasionally examines the larger world of college football as a whole. A particular passage that struck a chord with us was when you brought your son, Fox, to a Volunteer game for the first time. "We come to watch college football games and root for out teams not because we need to see them win but because it's part of who we are. In the South, college football is in our blood."

What is it about SEC football, and football in the South, that makes it different than anything else?

Clay Travis: Well, excluding major league baseball most sports leagues in this country aren't very old. We aren't a very old country for one thing. At the end of every NFL season comes the Super Bowl. But the first Super Bowl didn't even happen until 1967. My dad, my own dad, was already 23 when that happened! Yet the way the Super Bowl gets covered nowadays, it's like the event has been with us since the Pilgrims. The reality is, it's still really new.

SEC football began in 1933. And Southerners have considered it our own since before that time. And college football was very popular even before that, way back to the turn of the century. So I think SEC football is unique because it truly links generations down here.

Fox, my son, is named after my grandfather who played for General Neyland in 1933. I was raised a UT fan; UT football is literally in my blood. It's in Fox's. Other regions of the country don't have that relationship with football. The NFL came late to the South. It's a birthright down here in a way that I don't think any other sport in the country but major league baseball can even compare. It's also regional in a way that major league baseball isn't, the teams really aren't that far apart geographically, it's like baseball before World War II.

Then take a step back and imagine that baseball's 162 games were distilled into 12 Saturdays. No playoffs. 12 games. Can you imagine how crazy that would be? You can if you come South for a game.

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