For the past seven months, something truly remarkable has been happening in one of the darkest corners of sports media. Jason Whitlock, a sour dumb guy who has failed at basically every job he's ever had, and Clay Travis, a shameless grifter who has been wrong about every single thing he's ever said, have been working together at the same website that nobody reads. But yesterday brought bad news for the dozens of thumb-shaped sports fans who like to read a lot of one-sentence paragraphs about how LeBron James is a Marxist: Whitlock and Travis are breaking up.
In a post on his website, Outkick, Travis announced that Whitlock will no longer be his business partner, and will instead be pursuing his own new career path. The post was written in a sweaty, nothing-to-see-here tone that only served to make Whitlock's departure more suspicious. The Washington Post reported that Whitlock paid as much as $500,000 for an ownership stake in Outkick, which seems like a big investment to walk away from after just seven months. Additionally, Whitlock hasn't written a column at Outkick since mid-December, and he and Travis suddenly stopped interacting with each other on social media and appearing on each other's radio and streaming shows around that time. It sure seems like there is something besides Whitlock's desire to forge a new career path behind this split.
In any case, Travis has some work to do. The closest thing his website has to a business model is hustling for attention from the kind of psychopaths who attended the Capitol riot, and he just lost one of his main draws. Gone is the guy who called into a congressional hearing to say that BLM stands for "Bigots Love Marxism," who flew all the way to Washington D.C. to drowsily worship Donald Trump, and who just two days ago wrote a column for The Blaze in which he sympathized with the racist freaks who stormed the Capitol last week. If Travis can't find a suitable replacement for Whitlock, he might have to once again pivot to a new brand of shit-stirring. Seeing as how more than 21,000 Americans died from COVID-19 last week, the time seems right for him to get back to his real passion: telling everyone that the virus isn't a big deal.
Know anything about what's going on with Whitlock and Travis? Reach me at tom@defector.com.
