One September afternoon last year, I returned to my office where one of my staffers said something crazy had just happened on CNN.
Clay Travis, the editor of OutKickTheCoverage, had just shocked the very easily shocked anchor Brooke Baldwin by baldly telling her he believed in two things: "The First Amendment and boobs." Hardy har har. For Baldwin, it was so sexist she even stuttered in her tweet about it. For Travis, it was gold—he sold boxes of shirts with the phrase, further upped his national profile, and watched as conservative media had a field day mocking Baldwin's overreaction. (A former ESPN writer who was also on the panel and tut-tutted Travis's terrible disrespect was revealed to have sent numerous tweets talking about women's rears.)
After watching the clip, I chuckled at CNN's incompetence. Baldwin's producers should have prepared her for such a stunt—I've read Travis since I was a teenager and he's used that phrase for years. Her silly pearl-clutching played right into a storyline he's rammed into readers for years: mainstream and sports media are full of hypocritical liberal scolds, while he's the smart, mischievous prankster who can really tell you what's going on.
I tell that story because it's equivalent to my experience reading Travis's new book Republicans Buy Sneakers Too: How the Left is Ruining Sports With Politics. It's broad, anecdotal, and self-serving, but it's also fun, informative, and says something about the strange place in which moderate First Amendment stalwarts like Travis find themselves.
Travis has always written from the perspective of the diehard fan, and it's central to his appeal. He has positioned himself as the voice of Americans who are increasingly bothered by first downs, home runs, and three-pointers seemingly being replaced by national anthem protests, woke tweets, and Democratic endorsements on their sports channels. And before you dismiss him as an angry right-winger, Travis takes care to remind you he once worked for Al Gore, voted for Barack Obama twice, didn't support Donald Trump, and loathes George W. Bush.
He whips through some of the ridiculous political sports controversies over the past few years and how, in his view, sports media stayed beholden to liberal narratives rather than facts in covering them. For instance, the University of Missouri erupted overnight because someone found a poop swastika on a wall in 2015, but no one appeared to wonder why the heroic students and football players protesting ... something ... had so suddenly realized that their campus was incurably racist.
And of course, there's the absurd tales of political correctness that are conservative catnip. Who can forget the memorable story Travis himself broke: ESPN sidelined football commentator Robert Lee (an Asian American!) from covering a Virginia football game last fall because his name was too similar to Robert E. Lee and they were afraid of upsetting viewers in the wake of the Charlottesville violence.
ESPN, already financially suffering because of cable cord-cutting and bad sports rights television deals, has increasingly embraced political debates and left-wing storylines to please the social media crowd, and the rest of sports media has followed "MSESPN," as he likes to call it,"right over the political cliff." With a bevy of evidence and data to back up these assertions, plus his own lying eyes, Travis makes a convincing case that national sports reporters are overwhelmingly left-leaning and terrified of challenging storylines that don't fit in with neat narratives.
Travis gets into the weeds though, when he delights in blasting prominent liberal athletes like Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James as they've chosen to become more political. James, he writes, "needs unfairness and inequality to exist," and his political action on behalf of Democrats is a cynical part of his brand.
Travis's book reads like his columns: Blunt and funny, but unlikely to win over those who find his treatment of complicated stories to be too pat. He's more effective in taking the sports media writ large to task for being so blindly accepting of Kaepernick and James's politics than he is in assailing the players themselves for expressing opinions, even if they're wrongheaded or simplistic.
While Travis may not be a Republican, the book is clearly engineered to appeal to the heart of Trump Country. Donald Trump is shown literally dunking on Kaepernick—shouldn't he be scoring a touchdown?—and the author doesn't really delve at all into how the president's inflammatory injections of himself into sports have provoked strong responses.
Even the Michael Jordan quote that gave Travis his title is possibly apocryphal—a reference to the NBA superstar's reticence to comment publicly on politics because it would affect his universal appeal, Jordan has denied ever making that statement.
Travis's thesis can be summed up as sure, people have the right to speak their minds, but it would be great if the ESPNs of the world took more care to challenge the people they cover rather than showcase their obvious agreements. Travis, who's been called a "darling of the alt-right" and compared to Alex Jones in the past year, notes he wasn't considered "controversial" by the media until he began attacking left-wing writers and questioning stories like Michael Bennett's claim of racism at the hands of the Las Vegas police.
"I believe sports is our national connective tissue," Travis writes in the closing chapter entitled "How to Make Sports Great Again," and there is no disagreement here.
One of the primary reasons people love sports is the simple joy of it all: the healthiness of cheering for a team, the thrill of high-fiving strangers at the ballpark, the finality of a win or a loss, the meritocracy of the whole affair where the best man usually wins.
It may seem naïve to think sports can ever be just about who won the game anymore. It's not naïve, though, to call for balance in covering that dynamic.