But it was perhaps an even bigger moment for Clay Travis, who reportedly brokered the phone call, completing his only-in-2020 transformation from abrasive sports blogger to influential conservative sports radio host to apparent Trump campaign surrogate.
For years, Travis, who also hosts a gambling show on Fox Sports and runs a website called Outkick, has been building a brand partly rooted in attacking progressive athletes and “mainstream” journalists. But this summer, as the pandemic, protests over racial injustice and the approaching election collided with the return of sports, Travis’s nascent mini-media empire has morphed into the go-to platform for Republicans hoping to win over sports fans.
He’s done it with the help of a new business partner, the former Fox Sports personality Jason Whitlock, whose work, like Travis’s, shares political DNA with Trump’s: Sports as red meat in the culture wars, racial grievances, media-bashing.
Whitlock has churned out columns suggesting that George Floyd’s killing was a “race hoax used to divide us.” Travis has likened striking NBA players to George Costanza, the Seinfeld character who quit his job and then returned to it. Lately, Travis has also mixed in Trump’s casual dismissal of science, writing off the virus and telling people to “chill out" and peddling T-shirts making fun of mask-wearers.
Their takes have not gone unnoticed by the right. Both have appeared on the Fox News shows of Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. And a parade of conservative politicians and operatives — including U.S. senators, governors, White House aides and even Trump himself — have appeared on Travis’s show, to decry the NBA’s stance on China and cheerlead for the return of sports.
“I’m in regular touch with the White House press office,” Travis said in an interview. “I have a lot of fans in the White House.”
Nothing, though, has solidified Travis’s symbiosis with the GOP like college football, the subject that lured multiple Trumps onto Travis’s show.
"Kids, they get it and they have the sniffles. It’s almost none who have a serious problem with it,” Trump said on Travis’s radio show, referring to covid-19, a few weeks ago. “I think football is making a tragic mistake.”
A few days later, it was Donald Trump Jr.'s turn. “I can’t tell if some of this stuff is politically motivated because not going back to normalcy allows you to instill some fear that can be used as political leverage,” he said. “Let them play, man.”
The motivation is clear for politicos, said Republican strategist Jim Hobart, given Travis’s audience of red-state SEC fans.
“These sports issues can be a very effective base motivator," he explained. “They can drive donor interest, especially small-donor interest, and the reason they are going on with Clay is that he reaches the same audience that they are trying to reach.”
For Travis, the calculation may be riskier. After spending years lambasting the politicization of sports and arguing about the business downsides of activism, his own politics may be impacting his long-term position in sports media. At least one advertiser has left his radio show over his politics; a co-worker has publicly criticized him; and one Fox Sports employee said they were told directly that company executives have been dismayed by his misleading coronavirus commentary.
Travis, though, is undeterred. He predicted Outkick will be a $100 million company in 2021. Even if it isn’t, his future as a conservative pundit appears more secure by the day.
“There’s a knife fight for the 20 percent of sports fans that I would say are woke or are left-wing," he told The Washington Post. "I think people are cutting each other left and right, battling to be the media company that serves that left-wing component.”
The summer of Outkick
On July 10, with the NBA’s season set to resume, the office of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) sent out a news release. Why, it asked, would the NBA promote social justice on players’ jerseys but not allow them to support law enforcement or pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong?
One of the press release’s recipients, star ESPN reporter Adrian Wojnarowski, responded bluntly: “F--- You.”
Hawley tweeted a picture of the email and tagged one media outlet he thought might help spread word of Wojnarowski’s response: Travis’s Outkick. Hawley then taped three separate interviews with Travis and Whitlock, while another Outkick reporter broke the news that Wojnarowski was suspended by ESPN.
Sports have been a consistent target of Republicans since 2016, when Colin Kaepernick’s protest began and was viciously attacked by Trump (and Travis). In Outkick, Hawley saw the chance to take this message to die-hard sports fans, a potentially different group than he’d find on Fox News.
“It’s an audience of folks that are maybe not political junkies, they’re probably not watching ‘Meet the Press',” Hawley said in an interview.
But the coronavirus added a new dimension to the political tug of war for sports fans — especially once football season appeared in jeopardy. Rather than an argument over systematic racism, the return of sports could be framed as a health policy question: Was it safe to play or not?
