When his job as a pro football reporter brought him to Nashville in previous years, John McClain would field questions from friends about what Titans stars Steve McNair and Eddie George were really like.

Now when McClain, the legendary reporter with the Houston Chronicle, comes to Nashville he fields the same question, but not about Titans players.

“Now when I come here it’s, ‘What is Clay Travis really like?'” McClain said. “And I tell them, ‘What do you think he’s like?’

In the past eight years, Clay Travis, a Nashville native and 1997 graduate of Martin Luther King Magnet High School, has propelled himself from a couch-crashing blogger and aspiring author to a one-man sports media brand.

Travis is one-third of the on-air team for “3HL,” the ratings-dominating afternoon rush-hour show on 104.5 The Zone. His website, OutkicktheCoverage.com, has a lucrative licensing deal with Fox Sports. And Travis has added national TV to his list of accomplishments as part of Fox Sports 1’s college football show.

He has broken stories of national interest, turned local YouTube videos into social media sensations and waded happily into any and every controversial sports topic imaginable. And he has a certain knack for provoking vitriol in a way that great sports commentators seem to relish.

Not bad for a kid whose MLK classmates voted him “most likely to fall down while bowling.”

Travis is now a full-fledged celebrity, the guy sports fans in Nashville and throughout the Southeast want to know “what he’s really like.”

But eight years ago that sort of success appeared to be far away.

Dissatisfied with practicing law, which he did as a litigator and general practitioner in the Virgin Islands after graduating from Vanderbilt University School of Law, Travis set out to write his first sports book, “Dixieland Delight.”

He scalped tickets on the cheap, slept on friends’ couches and hit up all 12 SEC stadiums for about $3,000 in the fall of 2006 for his book about the region’s football culture.

The book was a success and, combined with his growing audience as a columnist on CBSSports.com, where he started writing for free, helped Travis’ career gain traction. He went on to write for a variety of websites and was able to make a living writing about this passion.

But if things had worked out a little differently, Travis actually might have had a career in politics instead of sports commentary.

Related: Full transcript of Clay Travis interview

During his time as an undergrad student at George Washington University, Travis interned for four summers in the office of then-U.S. Rep. Bob Clement.

He got a paying job on U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper’s 2002 campaign for the Nashville-area congressional seat, but Travis was fired from that gig. Travis said he went to see his girlfriend, now wife Lara Travis, out of town and had travel problems so he couldn’t return to the campaign as scheduled. That came on the heels of crashing the car of Cooper’s wife, Martha, and Travis was let go.

“It’s interesting to think about what I would have done,” Travis said. “I never really thought I would practice law because I always thought it was too slow-moving. Politics and writing were, I think, the two things that had the most appeal for me. That probably pushed me more toward the writing side versus the politics side.”

Stirring things up

Not long after writing “Dixieland Delight,” Travis began his radio career by doing a Tuesday night show with 104.5 The Zone host Chad Withrow. It was then that the station’s program director, Brad Willis, noticed Travis’ talent on the air. Opinionated, quick on his feet and completely unafraid to wade into controversy, Travis approached broadcasting with a litigator’s ferocity and a blogger’s irreverence.

He was added to the station’s midday show, which after achieving ratings success was moved to the prime 3-6 p.m. drive time slot.

“He’s a lightning rod because he’s opinionated,” Willis said. “When you have an opinion like that — when you’re on one side of the fence or the other — you’re going to stir things up a bit.”

Travis said his contract with “3HL” expires Aug. 31, and the two sides are in negotiations about an extension. Willis declined to comment.

To read the rest of the story visit The Tennessean where it was first published